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Carl> 

Cold-—, w.w ^. .y~j . y ~~ 

Eliot's Silas Marner 1903-1908 

Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield 1903-1905 

[mug's Life of Goldsmith 1906-1908 

Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal 1903-1908 

Scott's Ivanhoe 1903-1908 

Scott's Lady of the Lake 1906-1908 
Also in Rolffs Student? Series, to 

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar 1903-1905 

Shakespeare's Merchant of Ven- 
ice 1903-1908 
A'os. jj and 6~ t 

Shakespeare's Macbeth 1906- 1908 

61. The Sir Roger de Coverley 

Papers. Each part 1903- 1908 

and 6/ in otu I 
lennvs. >n*s Gareth and Lynette, 
Lancelot and Elaine, Pass- 
ing- of Arthur. 1906-1908 
Tennyson's Princess. 1903-1905 
Also in Rolfits Students' Sc> 
\*rs 



tit? 

IENTS 



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■5 


■-': 
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The seven numbers •• AY/;<; the years 

1903, 1904, 1005. ioco, 1907, and 190S are also bound in one vol- 
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HOUGHTON. MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 



Ctye iKttoerssiDe literature ^erieg 

Supervising Editor, HORACE E. S< UDDER, 1886-1901 

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Each regular single number, paper, /J cents. All prices net postpaid. 

1. Longfellow's Evangeline.*!}: 

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68. Goldsmith's Deserted Village, the Traveller, and Other Poems.* 

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72. Milton's L'Allegro. II Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, and Sonnets.*** 

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For explanation of signs see end of list. 




JAMBS B.U88KLL LOWELL 

From the crayon - a Eliot Sorion 



W^t Htberatoe Literature Series 



THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL 

AND OTHER POEMS 

BY 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, NOTES, PORTRAITS 
AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS 

AND WITH AIDS TO THE STUDY OF 
THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL 

BY 

H. A. DAVIDSON 




HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 85 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 378-388 Wabash Avenue 

(Stfoe fiilier?irje $re??, Cambribge 



Houghton-, Mifflin & Co. are the only authorised publishers 
of the works of Longfellow. "Whittier. Lowell. Holmes. Emer- 
son, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. AH editions which lack the im- 
print or authorization of Houghton. Mifflin & Co. are issued without 
the consent and contrary to the wishes of the authors or their heirs. 



3 

Two Copies rtecavtw 

i? iyo5 

1 AAc. Na 






Bi •' LMBB l:i S8KLL LOWELL. 



Copyi s 
Bl BOUGHTON, MIFFLIN ft CO 

-1// r. : ' 



The E 
BeOtlUt>p<d ;uid Printed by H. O. Hough: 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A Sketch of the Life of James Russell Lowell . . v 
The Vision of Sir Launfal 1 



POKMS HAVING A SPECIAL RELATION TO THE VlSION 

of Sir Launfal. Group A 

The Search (1847) 16 

A Parable (1848) 18 

Freedom (1848) 20 

Stanzas on Freedom (1843) 22 

Bibliolatres (1849) 23 

The Present Crisis (1845) 25 

To W. L. Garrison (1848) 31 

Wendell Phillips (1842) 33 

Group B 

Beaver Brook (1849) 35 

Al Fresco (1849) 37 

An Indian-Summer Reverie (1848) 40 

Hebe (1847) . 52 

The Oak (1846) 53 

The Harvard Commemoration 55 

Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration . . .59 

Memorls Positum 74 

Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic 

Monthly 77 

The First Snow-Fall 83 

The Changeling 85 

The Foot-Path 87 

Aladdin 88 



iv CONTENTS 

Aids to the Study of The Vision of Sir Launfal. 
By H. A. Davidson 
The Study of the Vision of Sir Launfal ... 89 
A Few References for the Study of Lowells Life and 

Works 100 

The Indebtedness of the Author of The Vision of Sir 

Launfal to Other Writers 101 

Topics for Study 103 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



FAGE 



James Russell Lowell Frontispiece 

Elmwood, Cambridge vi 

A< SlB Launfal made morn through the darksome gate '> 

So UK MI SKI), fcl 111 -U 0* \ MNMKK CLIME ... 12 

Low k.i. l in his Oxford Gowi 60 

Si \i 01 H\kv\i:i> I'mykk-ity To 

Robert Gould Shaw, William I.owki.i. I'iinam. Charles 
EIdbbbiiL Lowi ii. Jambs Jaobbob Lowbu . . .74 



A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF JAMES RUS- 
SELL LOWELL 



ELMWOOD 

About half a mile from the Craigie House in Cambridge, 
Mass., on the road leading to the old town of Watertown, 
is Elmwood, a spacious square house set amongst lilac and 
syringa bushes, and overtopped by elms. Pleasant fields 
are on either side, and from the windows one may look 
out on the Charles River winding its way among the 
marshes. The house itself is one of a group which before 
the war for independence belonged to Boston merchants and 
officers of the crown who refused to take the side of the 
revolutionary party. Tory Row was the name given to 
the broad winding road on which the houses stood. Great 
farms and gardens were attached to them, and some sign 
of their roomy ease still remains. The estates fell into the 
hands of various persons after the war, and in process of 
time Longfellow came to occupy Craigie House. Elmwood 
at that time was the property of the Reverend Charles 
Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston ; and when 
Longfellow thus became his neighbor, James Russell Lowell 
was a Junior in Harvard College. He was born at Elm- 
wood February 22, 1819. Any one who will read An In- 
dian-Summer Reverie will discover how affectionately Lowell 
dwelt on the scenes of nature and life amidst which he grew 
up. Indeed, it would be a pleasant task to draw from the 
full storehouse of his poetry the golden phrases with which 
he characterizes the trees, meadows, brooks, flowers, birds, 



vi SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF 

and human companions that were so near to him in his youth 
and so vivid in his recollection. In his prose works also, 
especially My Garden Acquaintance and A Good. Word 
for Winter ', Lowell has given glimpses of the outdoor life in 
the midst of which he grew up; and in Cambridge Thirty 
Years Ago, many reminiscences of his early life. 

II 

EDUCATION 

Lowell's acquaintance with books and his schooling began 
early. He learned his letters at a dame school. Mr. Wil- 
liam Weils, an Englishman, opened a classical school in one 
of the spacious Tory Row booses near Ehnwuud. and, bring- 
ing with him English public school thoroughly 
verity, gave the boy a drilling in Latin, which he must have 
made almost a native Bpeeeh,to judge by the ease with which 
he handled it afterward in mock heroics. Of course he went 
to Harvard College. He lived at his father's house, more 
than a mile away from the college yard : hut this could have 
been no great privation to him. for he had the freedom of 
his friends' rooms, ami he loved the open air. 

Lowell was hut fifteen years old when he entered college 
in the class which graduated in L838. H< WSJ a read 

so many of his fellows were, and the letters which he wiote 
.shortlv after leaving College -how how intent he had been 
on making acquaintance with the best things in literature. 
He began also to serifa 

and e>say> for coll JS chose him their 

poet for Class Day. and he wrote hi- poem: but he was 
Careless ahonl conforming to college regulations respecting 
attendance at morning prayers, and for this WSJ Suspended 
from college the last term of his last year, and not allowed 
to come back to read his poem, lie was sent to Concord 
for his rustication, and so passed a few weeks of his youth 
amongst scenes dear to every lover of American letters. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL vii 

III 

FIRST VENTURE 

After his graduation he set about the study of law, and 
for a short time was even a clerk in a counting-room ; but 
his bent was strongly toward literature. There was at that 
time no magazine of commanding importance in America, 
and young men were given to starting magazines with enthu- 
siasm and very little other capital. Such a one was the 
Boston Miscellany, launched by Nathan Hale, Lowell's 
college friend, and for this Lowell wrote gayly. It lived a 
year, and shortly after Lowell himself, with Robert Carter, 
essayed The Pioneer in 1843. It lived just three months ; 
but in that time printed contributions by Lowell, Haw- 
thorne, Whittier, Story, Poe, and Dr. Parsons, — a group 
which it would be hard to match in any of the little maga- 
zines that hop across the world's path to-day. Lowell had 
already collected, in 1841, the poems which he had written 
and sometimes contributed to periodicals into a volume en- 
titled A Year's Life ; but he retained very little of the con- 
tents in later editions of his poems. The book has a special 
interest, however, from its dedication, in veiled phrase, to 
Maria White. He became engaged' to this lady in the fall 
of 1840, and the next twelve years of his life were pro- 
foundly affected by her influence. Herself a poet of deli- 
cate power, she brought into his life an intelligent sympathy 
with his work ; it was, however, her strong moral enthusi- 
asm, her lofty conception of purity and justice, which kin- 
dled his spirit and gave force and direction to a character 
which was ready to respond, and yet might otherwise have 
delayed active expression. They were not married until 
1844 ; but they were not far apart in their homes, and dur- 
ing these years Lowell was making those early ventures in 
literature, and first raids upon political and moral evil, 
which foretold the direction of his later work, and gave 
some hint of its abundance. 



viii SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF 

About the time of his marriage, he published two books 
which by their character show pretty well the divided in- 
terest of his life. His bent from the beginning was more 
decidedly literary than that of any contemporary American 
poet. That is to say, the history and art of literature di- 
vided his interest with the production of literature, and he 
carried the unusual gift of a rare critical power, joined to 
hearty spontaneous creation. It may indeed be guessed 
that the keenness of judgment and incisiveness of wit which 
characterize his examination of literature sometimes inter- 
fered with his poetic power, and made him liable to question 
his art when he would rather have expressed it unchecked. 
One of the two books was a volume of poems ; the other was 
a prose work, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. He 
did not keep this book alive ; but it is interesting as mark- 
ing the enthusiasm of a young scholar treading a way then 
almost wholly neglected in A merica , and intimating a line 
of thought and study in which lie afterward made most note- 
worthy venture. Another Beriet of poems followed in 1848. 
and in the same year Th> Vision of Sir LaunfitL Perhaps 
it was in reaction from the marked sentiment of his poetry 
that he issued now a jeu <l'r.</>rit. A Fhble/br Critics, in 
which he hit off. with a rough and ready wit. the character- 
istics of the writer- of the day. not forgetting himself in 
these lines : — 

"Them i- Lowell, "ho '■ stri\inu r Pki i— m to climb 
With a whole bale of inn lied to ge thei with rhyme; 

He illicit get <>n alon.-. niftt -'t l-ramU.-s and boulders. 

Hut he oaaH with thai bundle be bee on his shoulders; 

The top of the hill he will neYr BOOM BJgfc reaching 

Till he learns the distinction 'twivt Mii-ing and preaching; 

Hi- lyre bee eome ehorcfa that would riag pretty well. 

But he 'd rather lyv half make a drum of tin- shell. 

And rattle a\va\ till kfl 's old M M- -thusab-m. 

At the head of a inarch to the last new Jerusalem.*' 

This, of course, is but a half-serious portrait of himself. 
and it touches but a single feature ; others can say better 
that Lowell's ardent nature showed itself in the series of 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL ix 

satirical poems which made him famous, The Biff low Papers, 
written in a spirit of indignation and fine scorn, when the 
Mexican War was causing many Americans to blush with 
shame at the use of the country by a class for its own ignoble 
ends. Lowell and his wife, who brought a fervid anti- 
slavery temper as part of her marriage portion, were both 
contributors to the Liberty Bell ; and Lowell was a frequent 
contributor to the Anti-Slavery Standard, and was, indeed, 
for a while a corresponding editor. In June, 1846, there 
appeared one day in the Boston Courier a letter from 
Mr. Ezekiel Biglow of Jaalam to the editor, Hon. Joseph T. 
Buckingham, inclosing a poem of his son, Mr. Hosea Biglow. 
It was no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention 
with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack 
Downing and Sam Slick had been notable examples, and 
they had many imitators ; but the reader who laughed over 
the racy narrative of the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took 
up Hosea's poem and caught the gust of Yankee wrath and 
humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was in at the 
appearance of something new in American literature. The 
force which Lowell displayed in these satires made his book 
at once a powerful ally of an anti-slavery sentiment which 
heretofore had been ridiculed. 



IV 

VERSE AND PROSE 

A year in Europe, 1851-1852, with his wife, whose health 
was then precarious, stimulated his scholarly interests, and 
gave substance to his study of Dante and Italian literature. 
In October, 1853, his wife died ; she had borne him four 
children : the first-born, Blanche, died in infancy, as did 
another daughter, Rose ; the third child, Walter, also died 
young ; the fourth, a daughter, Mrs. Burnett, survived her 
parents. In 1855 he was chosen successor to Longfellow 
as Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages 



x SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF 

and Literature, and Professor of Belles Lettres in Harvard 
College. He spent two years in Europe in further prepa- 
ration for the duties of his office, and in 1857 was again 
established in Cambridge, and installed in his academic 
chair. He married, also, at this time Miss Frances Dunlap, 
of Portland, Maine. 

Lowell was now in his thirty-ninth year. As a scholar, 
in his professional work, he had acquired a versatile know- 
ledge of the Romance languages, and was an adept in old 
French and Provengal poetry ; he had given a course of 
twelve lectures on English poetry before the Lowell Insti- 
tute in Boston, which had made a strong impression on the 
community, and his work on the series of British Poets in 
connection with Professor Child, especially his biographical 
sketch of Keats, had been recognized as of a high order. 
In poetry he had published the volumes already mentioned. 
In general literature he had printed in magazines the pa- 
pers which lie afterward collected into his volume. I 
Travels. Not long after he entered on his college duties. 
The Atlantic Monthly was started, and the editorship given 
to him. He held the office for a year or two only : but he 
continued to write for the magazine, and in 1862 he was 
associate. 1 witli Mr. Charles Eliot Norton in the conduct of 
The North A nd continued in this charge 

for ten yean. Ifoeh <>t hi- prooe eras contributed to this 
periodical. Any one reading the title- of the papers which 
comprise the volumes <»t" hi- prose irritings will readily >ee 

how much literature, and especially poetic literatu: 

pied hi- attention. Shakespeare, Dryden, Leasing, Rous- 
seau, Dante. Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton. Keats, Carlyle, 

Percival. Thoivau. Swinburne. Chancer, K: 
Gray, — these are the principal subjects of his j; 
the range of topics indicates the catholicity of his taste. 

In these paper-, when Studying poetry, he was very much 
alive to the personality of the poets, ami it was hifl 
interest in humanity which led Lowell, when he was most 
diligent in the pursuit of literature, to apply himself also to 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL xi 

history and politics. Several of his essays bear witness to 
this, such as Witchcraft, New England Two Centuries 
Ago, A Great Public Character (Josiah Quincy), Abraham 
Lincoln, and his great Political Essays. But the most 
remarkable of his writings of this order was the second 
series of The Biglow Papers, published during the war for 
the Union. In these, with the wit and fun of the earlier 
series, there was mingled a deeper strain of feeling and a 
larger tone of patriotism. The limitations of his style in 
these satires forbade the fullest expression of his thought 
and emotion ; but afterward in a succession of poems, occa- 
sioned by the honors paid to student soldiers in Cambridge, 
the death of Agassiz, and the celebration of national anni- 
versaries during the years 1875 and 1876, he sang in loftier, 
more ardent strains. The most famous of these poems was 
his noble Commemoration Ode. 



PUBLIC LIFE 

It was at the close of this period, when he had done incal- 
culable service to the Republic, that Lowell was called on 
to represent the country, first in Madrid, where he was sent 
in 1877, and then in London, to which he was transferred in 
1880. Eight years were thus spent by him in the foreign 
service of his country. He had a good knowledge of the 
Spanish language and literature when he went to Spain ; 
but he at once took pains to make his knowledge fuller and 
his accent more perfect, so that he could have intimate re- 
lations with the best Spaniards of the time. In England he 
was at once a most welcome guest, and was in great demand 
as a public speaker. No one can read his dispatches from 
Madrid and London without being struck by his sagacity, 
his readiness in emergencies, his interest in and quick per- 
ception of the political situation in the country where he 
was resident, and his unerring knowledge as a man of the 



xii JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

world. Above all, he was through and through an Ameri- 
can, true to the principles which underlie American institu- 
tions. His address on Democracy, which he delivered in 
England, is one of the great statements of human liberty. 
A few years later, after his return to America, he gave an- 
other address to his own countrymen on The Place of the 
Independent in Politics. It was a noble defence of his own 
position, not without a trace of discouragement at the appar- 
ently sluggish movement in American self-government of 
recent years, but with that faith in the substance of his 
countrymen which gave him the right to use words of hon- 
est warning. 

The public life of Mr. Lowell made him more of a figure 
before the world. He received honors from societies and 
universities ; he was decorated by the highest honors which 
Harvard could pay officially ; and Oxford and Cambridge, 
St. Andrews and Edinburgh and Bologna gave gowns. 
He established warm persona] relation- with Englishmen, 
and after his release from public office he made several 
visits to England. There, too, was buried his second wife, 
who died in 1885. The closing yean of his life in his own 

country, though marked by domestic loneliness and growing 

physical Infirmities, were rich in the continued expression of 
his large personality and in the esteem of hosts of friends. 
He delivered the poblifl address in eonimemoration of the 
260th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University : 
he gave a COOTSe of lectures on the OKI English Dramatists 
before the Lowell Institute; lie collected a volume of his 
poemfl : he wrote and spoke on public affairs : and. the year 
before his death, revised, lOtl I Bilged, and carefully edited a 
definitive series of his writings in ten volumes. He died at 
Elmwood, August 12, L891. Since his death three small 
volumes have been added to his collected writings, and 
Mr. Norton has edited Letter* BttSSSti Lowell, in 

two volumes. His Life, in two volumes, has been written 
by Horace E. Scudder. and also, in the American Mi 
Letters Scries, by Ferris Greenslet. 



THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL 



PRELUDE TO PART FIRST 

Over his keys the musing organist, 

Beginning doubtfully and far away, 
First lets his fingers wander as they list, 

And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay : 
Then, as the touch of his loved instrument 5 

Gives hope and fervor, nearer draws his theme, 
First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent 

Along the wavering vista of his dream. 



Not only around our infancy 

Doth heaven with all its splendors lie ; 10 

Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, 

We Sinais climb and know it not. 

4. See Lowell's own 

" From one stage of our being to the next 
We pass unconscious o'er a slender bridge, 
The momentary work of unseen hands." . . . 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

9. Read the first four stanzas of Ode on Intimations of Immor- 
tality, and notice the similarity between Wordsworth's joyous May 
and Lowell's June. For the substitution of June for the May of 
English poets, see the opening stanzas of Under the Willows. 
The allusion in line 9 is rather to the thought of the entire stanza 
in the ode than to any single phrase or line. 

12. Sinais climb. See The Study of the Vision of Sir Laun- 
faly p. 92, and Lowell's Letters, i, 190. 



2 THE VISION OF SIR LA UNFA L 

Over our manhood bend the skies : 

Against our fallen and traitor lives 
The great winds utter prophecies : 15 

With our faint hearts the mountain strives ; 
Its arms outstretched, the Druid wood 

Waits with its benedicite ; 
And to our age's drowsy blood 

Still shouts the inspiring sea. 20 

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us ; 

The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in. 
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrive- as, 

We bargain for the graves we lie in; 
At the Devil's booth are all things sold. 28 

Each ounce of dross oosta it- ounce of gold ; 

17. Druid wood. Poets are fond of this figure. See -Druid- 
like device,'' Indian-Summer Reverie; also Evangeline, — 

•• The murmuring: pines and the hemlocks 
Bearded with mou, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight 
Stand like Druids of eld." 

The priests of the pagan religion among the Celts, the 
Druids, performed many rites in the woods, and the o 

Bially, and the mistletoe were important in certain ceremonies. 

For the value attached to mintletirfi growing opoo an oak-tree, 
and for the manner of cutting it withs golden fickle, set- Brand's 
Popular Antiqukie*. Longfellow ases this figure as a means of 

description, hut Lowell gives to it a hidden meanii _ 
admirably adapts the form to the \ - poem. In his 

thought the trees oi the rotes! hare beoasne, in this later time, 
the hearers oi divine mrnnsgfMi. thnn taking the place of the 
priests who formerly found in them symbols of secret and un- 
known influences, potent bo bless or to bast 

18. benedicite. See " old ben ij recall " in Al 
. iud Wordsworth's 

" The thought Of our DM* years in me doth breed 
Perpetual bened 



PRELUDE TO PART FIRST 3 

For a cap and bells our lives we pay, 
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking : 

'T is heaven alone that is given away, 
'T is only God may be had for the asking ; 30 

No price is set on the lavish summer ; 
June may be had by the poorest comer. 

And what is so rare as a day in June ? 

Then, if ever, come perfect days ; 
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, 35 

And over it softly her warm ear lays ; 
Whether we look, or whether we listen, 
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten ; 
Every clod feels a stir of might, 

An instinct within it that reaches and towers, 40 
And, groping blindly above it for light, 

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers : 
The flush of life may well be seen 

Tli rilling back over hills and valleys: 
The cowslip startles in meadows green, 45 

The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, 
And there 's never a leaf nor a blade too mean 

27. The reference to the court jester of the Middle Ages is 
obvious. For the young, the significance of the figure borrowed 
from the adornment of the king's fool should be interpreted by 
conversation and illustration. 

35. Compare with Lowell's personification of spring in 

" Jes' so our Spring gits everythin' in tune." 

Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line. 

42. Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers. Wordsworth 
says, in the Ode, 

" The sunshine is a glorious birth," 

and he devotes the whole of the next stanza of his poem to the 
manifestations of this glorious birth in the abounding life of the 
springtime. 



4 THE VISION OF SIR LA UNFA L 

To be some happy creature's palace ; 
The little bird sits at his door in the sun, 

Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, 50 

And lets his illumined being o'errun 

With the deluge of summer it receives ; 
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings, 
And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings ; 
He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest, — ">.5 
In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best ? 

Now is the high-tide of the year. 

And whatever of life hath ebbed away 
Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer. 

Into every bare inlet and creek and bay: 60 

Now the heart i- BO full that a drop overfills it. 
We are happy now because God wills it: 
No matter how barren the past may have been, 
"T is enough for us now that the leav. fl ;uv -reen ; 
We -it in the warm shade and fee] right well 56 

How the sap creeps ap and the blossoms swell 5 
We may shut our eye-, but we cannot help knowing 
That dries are clear and grass i- growing; 

The breeze OOmOS whispering in Oar ear. 

That dandelions are blossoming near. To 

That maize has sprouted, that streams are flowing, 
That the river is bluer than the sky. 
That tlie robin is plastering hi- house hard by : 
And it the breeze kept the good n0W8 baek. 
For other couriers we should not lack : 

We could guess it all by yon heifer's lowing, — 
And hark I how (dear bold chanticleer, 
Warmed with the new wine of the year. 

Tells all in his tasty crowing! 



PART FIRST 5 

Joy conies, grief goes, we know not how ; 80 

Everything is happy now, 

Everything is upward striving ; 
'T is as easy now for the heart to be true 
As for grass to be green or skies to be blue, — 

'T is the natural way of living : 85 

Who knows whither the clouds have fled ? 

In the un scarred heaven they leave no wake ; 
And the eyes forget the tears they have shed, 

The heart forgets its sorrow and ache ; 
The soul partakes the season's youth, 90 

And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe 
Lie deep 'neath a silence pure and smooth, 

Like burnt-out craters healed with snow. 
What wonder if Sir Launfal now 
Remembered the keeping of his vow ? 95 



PART FIRST 



« My golden spurs now bring to me, 
And bring to me my richest mail, 
For to-morrow I go over land and sea 

In search of the Holy Grail ; 
Shall never a bed for me be spread, 100 

Nor shall a pillow be under my head, 

80. Compare Lowell's expression of the joyousness of all na- 
ture, animate and inanimate, with Wordsworth's 

" And all the earth is gay ; 
Land and sea 
Give themselves up to jollity." . . . 

and 

" Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call 
Ye to each other make." . . . 



THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL 

Till I begin my vow to keep ; 

Here on the rushes will I sleep. 

And perchance there may come a vision true 

Ere day create the world anew." 105 

Slowly Sir Launfal's eyes grew dim, 

Slumber fell like a cloud on him, 
And into his soul the vision flew. 



The crows flapped over by twos and threes, 

In the pool drowsed the cattle up to their knees, 110 
The little birds Bang as if it were 
The one day of summer in all the year. 

And the very leaves seemed to sing on the trees: 

The castle alone in the landscape lay 

Like an outpost of winter, dull and gray : 115 

'T was the proudest hall in the North Countree. 

And never its gates might opened be, 

Save to lord or lady of high degree; 

Summer besieged it on every side. 

But the churlish stone her assaults defied ; 120 

She could not BCalfi the chilly wall. 

Though around it for leagues her pavilion* tall 
Stretched left and right, 

Over the hills and out of Sight : 

Green and broad was every tent. 12s 

And out (A' each a murmur went 
Till the breeze fell off at night 



The drawbridge dropped with a surly clang, 

And through the dark arch a charger sprang. 
Bearing Sir Launfal. the maiden knight, ISO 




AS SIR LAUNFAL MADE MORN THROUGH THE DARKSOME GATE 



PART FIRST 7 

In liis gilded mail, that flamed so bright 

* It seemed the dark castle had gathered all 

* Those shafts the fierce sun had shot over its wall 
7 In his siege of three hundred summers long, 

* And, binding them all in one blazing sheaf, 135 

Had cast them forth : so, young and strong, 
•And lightsome as a locust-leaf, 
Sir Launfal flashed forth in his maiden mail, 

• To seek in all climes for the Holy Grail. 



It was morning on hill and stream and tree, 140 
And morning in the young knight's heart ; 

Only the castle moodily 

Rebuffed the gifts of the sunshine free, 
And gloomed by itself apart ; 

The season brimmed all other things up 145 

Full as the rain fills the pitcher-plant's cup. 



As Sir Launfal made morn through the darksome 
gate, 

He was 'ware of a leper, crouched by the same, 
Who begged with his hand and moaned as he sate ; 

And a loathing over Sir Launfal came ; 150 

The sunshine went out of his soul with a thrill, 

The flesh 'neath his armor 'gan shrink and crawl, 
And midway its leap his heart stood still 

Like a frozen waterfall ; 
For this man, so foul and bent of stature, 155 

Rasped harshly against his dainty nature, 
And seemed the one blot on the summer morn, — 
So he tossed him a piece of gold in scorn. 



8 THE VISION OF SIR LAUXFAL 

XI 
The leper raised not the gold from the dust : 
" Better to me the poor man's crust, 160 

Better the blessing of the poor, 
Though I turn me empty from his door : 
That is no true alms which the hand can hold ; 
He gives nothing but worthless gold 

Who gives from a sense of duty : 165 

But he who gives but a slender mite. 
And gives to that which is out of sight. 

That thread of the all-sustaining Beauty 
Which runs through all and doth all unite, — 
The hand cannot clasp the whole of his alms. 170 
The heart outstretches its eager palms, 
For a god goes with it and makes it store 
To the sold that was starving in darkness before." 

PRELUDE TO PART SECOND 

Down swept the ehill wind from the mountain peak. 
From the snow five thousand summers old; 17." 

168. In Bnir>r Brook btc Um In 

"To see how Beauty underlie* 

IBM each form of use," 

find in The Oak- the line- 

ll] Thy works are lessons : each contain* 
Some emblem of man's all-containing soul" 

The last stanza of Ode on Intimation* oflmmorta lin an- 

other way that all nature bear- a divine menage to the OUHMIUit 
171. Different moods are indicated by the two Preludes. The 
one is of June, the other of snow and winter: in each, the pott. 
like an Organist, strike- a key which he holds in the subsequent 
parts. The second Prelude should correspond in literary form 
and significance with the tirst. For a discussion of this point, 
see p. 98. In the letter of Mr. Hosea Higlow. pp. 77-83, the lines 



PRELUDE TO PART SECOND 9 

On open wold and hilltop bleak 
It had gathered all the cold, 
And whirled it like sleet on the wanderer's cheek ; 
It carried a shiver everywhere 

From the unleafed boughs and pastures bare ; 180 

The little brook heard it and built a roof 
'Neath which he could house him, winter-proof ; 
All night by the white stars' frosty gleams 
He groined his arches and matched his beams ; 
Slender and clear were his crystal spars 185 

As the lashes of light that trim the stars ; 
He sculptured every summer delight 
In his halls and chambers out of sight ; 
Sometimes his tinkling waters slipt 
Down through a frost-leaved forest-crypt, 190 

Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees 
Bending to counterfeit a breeze ; 
Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew 
But silvery mosses that downward grew ; 
Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief 195 

With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf ; 

beginning " Snow-flakes come whisperin' on the pane " suggest, 
without parallelling, the description of winter given here. 

181. In An Indian-Summer Reverie is a description of the river 
in " smooth plate-armor," . . . 

" By the frost's clinking hammers forged at night." 

The difference in these two descriptions lies chiefly in point of 
view ; the little brook builds himself a house, and literally roofs 
it above his head. Lowell, in imagination, writes his description 
of this winter palace of ice from within, personifying the brook 
as builder and inhabitant. In the other description, written 
earlier, the river is seen from above, as encased in armor and 
exposed to the " lances of the sun." Even in the " fresh-sparred 
grots," and " the grass-arched channels to the sun denied," in 
the next stanza, the vision in the mind is always of the poet, or 



10 THE VISION OF SIR LA UNFA L 

Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear 

For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here 

He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops 

And hung them thickly with diamond-drops, 200 

That crystalled the beams of moon and sun, 

And made a star of every one : 

No mortal builder's most rare device 

Could match this winter-palace of ice : 

'T was as if every image that mirrored lay 

In his depths serene through the summer day. 

Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, 

Lest the happy model should be !<>>t. 
Had been mimicked in fairy masonry 

By the elfin builders of the frost. jio 



Within the hull are Bong and laughter, 

The cheeks of Christmas grow red and jolly, 

And sprouting is every corbel and rafter 
With lightsome green of ivy and holly; 

the Trader, standing 00 the bank above and looking clown on 

'• the ebbing river.* 1 

In the descent of the storm-wii; the cold, and in 

the deaeriptaon of morning, her v. 

decrepitlv "for ■ last dim look at earth and » 

haunting suggestion of the storm-blast in Mariner 

chasing the good ship southward through mist and snow, but there 

is nowhere an imitation or ■ borrowed phrase. Tin ; 
eatehes the very spirit and life from another man's work and 

thus enriches his own imagination* The resemblance tl. 

thus is elusive and difficult to trace, and is found, if at all, in B 
subtle similarity oi atmosphere or purpose, or figurative 
tion. adapted to a new point of view or use. 

203, The Empress of Bosnia, Catherine II, in a magnificent 
freak, built a palace of ice. which was a nine-days' 
Cowper has given a poetical description of U 
lines 131-176. For Lowell's indebtedness to this poem. M 



PRELUDE TO PART SECOND 1 1 

Through the deep gulf of the ehiiiiney wide 215 

Wallows the Yule-log's roaring tide ; 
The broad flame-pennons droop and flap 

And belly and tug as a flag in the wind ; 
Like a locust shrills the imprisoned sap, 

Hunted to death in its galleries blind ; 220 

And swift little troops of silent sparks, 

Now pausing, now scattering away as in fear, 
Go threading the soot-forest's tangled darks 

Like herds of startled deer. 

But the wind without was eager and sharp, 225 

Of Sir Launfal's gray hair it makes a harp, 
And rattles and wrings 
The icy strings, 
Singing, in dreary monotone, 

A Christmas carol of its own, 230 

Whose burden still, as he might guess, 
Was " Shelterless, shelterless, shelterless ! " 
The voice of the seneschal flared like a torch 
As he shouted the wanderer away from the porch, 
And he sat in the gateway and saw all night 235 

The great hall-fire, so cheery and bold, 
Through the window-slits of the castle old, 
Build out its piers of ruddy light 
Against the drift of the cold. 

216. The Yule-log was anciently a huge log burned at the 
feast of Juul (pronounced Yule) by our Scandinavian ancestors 
in honor of the god Thor. Juul-tid (Yule-time) corresponded 
in time to Christmas tide, and when Christian festivities took the 
place of pagan, many ceremonies remained. The great log, still 
called the Yule-log, was dragged in and burned in the fireplace 
after Thor had been forgotten. 



12 THE VISION OF SIR LA UN FA L 

PART SECOND 



There was never a leaf on bush or tree, 240 

The bare boughs rattled shudderingly ; 
The river was dumb and could not speak, 

For the weaver Winter its shroud had spun ; 
A single crow on the tree-top bleak 

From his shining feathers shed off the cold sim : 245 
Again it was morning, but shrunk and cold, 
As if her veins wen sapless and old. 
And she rose up decrepitlv 
For a last dim look at earth and sea. 



Sir Launfal turned from his own hard gale, 250 

For another heir in his earldom sate ; 

An old, bent man. worn out and frail. 

He came back from seeking the Holy Grail : 

Little lie recked of his earldom's loss, 

No more on his sun-oat was blazoned the cross. 2'^ 
But deep in his soul the sign he wore. 
The badge of the Buffering and the poor. 



Sir Launfal's raiment thin and span 

Was idle mail 'gainst the barbed air. 

For it was just at the Christinas time : 

So he mused, as he sat. of a sunnier clime. 

And sought for a shelter from cold and snow 

In the light and warmth of long-ago : 

He sees the snake-like caravan crawl 




HE MUSED, AS HE SAT, OF A SUNNIER CLIME 



PART SECOND 13 

O'er the edge of the desert, black and small, 265 

Then nearer and nearer, till, one by one, 

He can count the camels in the sun, 

As over the red-hot sands they pass 

To where, in its slender necklace of grass, 

The little spring laughed and leapt in the shade, 270 

And with its own self like an infant played, 

And waved its signal of palms. 

IV 

For Christ's sweet sake, I beg an alms ; " — 

The happy camels may reach the spring, 

But Sir Launfal sees only the grewsome thing, 275 

The leper, lank as the rain-blanched bone, 

That cowers beside him, a thing as lone 

And white as the ice-isles of Northern seas 

In the desolate horror of his disease. 



And Sir Launfal said, " I behold in thee 280 

An image of Him who died on the tree ; 

Thou also hast had thy crown of thorns, 

Thou also hast had the world's buffets and scorns, 

And to thy life were not denied 

The wounds in the hands and feet and side : 285 

Mild Mary's Son, acknowledge me ; 

Behold, through him, I give to Thee ! " 



Then the soul of the leper stood up in his eyes 
And looked at Sir Launfal, and straightway he 

Remembered in what a haughtier guise 290 

He had flung an alms to leprosie, 



14 THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL 

When he girt his young life up in gilded mail 

And set forth in search of the Holy Grail. 

The heart within him was ashes and dust ; 

He parted in twain his single crust, 295 

He broke the ice on the streamlet's brink, 

And gave the leper to eat and drink : 

'T was a mouldy crust of coarse brown bread. 

'T was water out of a wooden bowl, — 
Yet with fine wheaten bread was the leper fed. 300 

And "t was red wine he drank with his thirsty soul. 

VII 

As Sir Launfal mused with a downcast face. 

A light shone round about tin* place : 

The leper no longer crouched at his side. 

But stood before him glorified, 305 

Shining and tall and fair and straight 

As the pillar that stood by tin- Beautiful Gate,— 

Himself the Grate whereby men can 

Enter the temple of God in Man. 309 



His word- were -hc<l softer than leave- from the pine. 
And they fell on Sir Launfal a- -now- on the brine. 

310. Lowell Mem to have used lure a figure first suggested 
by Tennyson's lines, 

tliat softer fall* 

Tli.ui ihU.U> fr. in blown roses on the grass." 

The suggestion is remote ami most be traced through LoweWi 
fondness for poetic phrases ami an almost onoonseious adaptation 

of the figure to the more severe land of northern eold with which 
he was familiar. Our poet was also familiar with the source from 
which Tennyson drew >o much of the beautiful imagery of !'•■ 

Loto.< Fattrs, QSntme, and other early Idylls. In a letter dated 
June 28, L839, he writes : "I have found a treasure to-day, — S 



PART SECOND 15 

That mingle their softness and quiet in one 
With the shaggy unrest they float down upon ; 
I '"-And the voice that was calmer than silence said, 

" Lo, it is I, be not afraid ! 315 

In many climes, without avail, 
Thou hast spent thy life for the Holy Grail ; 
Behold, it is here, — this cup which thou 
Didst fill at the streamlet for Me but now ; 
This crust is My body broken for thee 320 

This water His blood that died on the tree ; 

' U'he TKIy~S upper is kept, Tncteext; 

In whatso we share with another's need : 

>Not what we give, but what we share, — ■ 
For the gift without the giver is bare ; 325 

Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, — 
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me." 

IX 

Sir Launfal awoke as from a swound : — 
•' The Grail in my castle here is found ! 
Hang my idle armor up on the wall, 330 

Let it be the spider's banquet-hall ; 
He must be fenced with stronger mail 
Who would seek and find the Holy Grail." 



The castle gate stands open now, 

And the wanderer is welcome to the hall 335 

small volume of about five hundred pages ; not one of your 
attenuated modern things that seem like milk and water watered, 
but a goodly fat little fellow and full of the choicest dainties, viz. : 
Hesiod, Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, and extracts from Orpheus 
and some forty others, all with a Latin translation ad verbum. 



16 RELATED POEMS — GROUP A 

As the hangbird is to the elm-tree bough ; 

No longer scowl the turrets tall, 
The Summer's long siege at last is o'er ; 
When the first poor outcast went in at the door, 
She entered with him in disguise, 340 

And mastered the fortress by surprise ; 
There is no spot she loves so well on ground, 
She lingers and smiles there the whole year round ; 
The meanest serf on Sir Launfal's land 
Has hall and bower at his command : 345 

And there 's no poor man in the North Countree 
But is lord of the earldom as much as he. 

POEMS HAVING A SPECIAL RELATION TO 

THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL. GROUP A 1 

THE SEARCH 

I went to seek for Christ, 
And Nature seemed bo fair 

That first the woods and fields my youth MltlOed, 

And I was sure to find him then-: 

The temple I forsook, 5 

And to the Bolitode 
Allegiance paid ; bat Winter came and >hook 

The crown and purple from my wood ; 
His snows, like desert Bands, with Boornful drift, 

Besieged the columned aisle and palaoe-gate; 10 
My Thebes, out deep with many a solemn rift. 

But epitaphed her own sepulchred state : 
Then 1 remembered whom I went to seek. 
And blessed blunt Winter for his counsel bleak. 

1 See The Study of The Vision of Sir Launfai. y. $L 



THE SEARCH 17 

Back to the world I turned, L5 

For Christ, I said, is King; 
So the cramped alley and the hut I spurned, 
As far beneath his sojourning : 
Mid power and wealth I sought, 
But found no trace of him, 20 

And all the costly offerings I had brought 
With sudden rust and mould grew dim : 
I found his tomb, indeed, where, by their laws, 
All must on stated days themselves imprison, 
Mocking with bread a dead creed's grinning jaws, 25 

Witless how long the life had thence arisen ; 
Due sacrifice to this they set apart, 
Prizing it more than Christ's own living heart. 

So from my feet the dust 

Of the proud World I shook ; 30 

Then came dear Love and shared with me his crust, 
And half my sorrow's burden took. 
After the World's soft bed, 
Its rich and dainty fare, 
Like down seemed Love's coarse pillow to my head, 35 

His cheap food seemed as manna rare ; 
Fresh-trodden prints of bare and bleeding feet, 
Turned to the heedless city whence I came, 
Hard by I saw, and springs of worship sweet 

Gushed from my cleft heart smitten by the same ; 40 
Love looked me in the face and spake no words, 
But straight I knew those footprints were the Lord's. 

I followed where they led, 
And in a hovel rude, 
With naught to fence the weather from his head, 45 



18 A PARABLE 

The King I sought for meekly stood : 
A naked, hungry child 
Clung round his gracious knee. 
And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled 

To bless the smile that set him free ; 50 

New miracles I saw his presence do, — 

No more I knew the hovel bare and poor. 
The gathered chips into a woodpile grew. 

The broken morsel swelled to goodly store : 
I knelt and wept : my Christ no more I seek, 55 
His throne is with the outcast and the weak. 



A PARABLE 

Said Christ our Lord, •• I will go and see 
How the men, my brethren, believe in me." 
He passed not again through the gate of birih, 
Bui made himself known to the children of earth. 

Then said tin- chief priests, and ruler-, and ki a 
•Behold, now. tin- Giver of all good tliin _ - . 
Go to. let us welcome with pomp and state 
Him who alone i- mighty and great.* 1 

With carpets of gold tin- ground they spread 

Wherever thr Son of Man should tread, in 

And in palaee-ehamhei- lofty and rare 

They Lodged him. and served him with kingly fare. 

Great organs Burged through arches dim 

Their jubilant floods in praise oi him : 

And in church, and palace, and judgment-hall, 15 

He saw his own image high over all. 



A PARABLE 19 

But still, wherever his steps they led, 

The Lord in sorrow bent down his head, 

And from under the heavy foundation-stones, 

The son of Mary heard bitter groans. 20 

And in church, and palace, and judgment-hall, 
He marked great fissures that rent the wall, 
And opened wider and yet more wide 
As the living foundation heaved and sighed. 

u Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then, 25 
On the bodies and souls of living men ? 
And think ye that building shall endure, 
Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor? 

" With gates of silver and bars of gold 
Ye have fenced my sheep from their Father's fold ; 
I have heard the dropping of their tears 31 

In heaven these eighteen hundred years." 

" O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt, 
We build but as our fathers built ; 
Behold thine images, how they stand, 35 

Sovereign and sole^ through all our land. 

" Our task is hard, — with sword and flame 
To hold thine earth forever the same, 
And with sharp crooks of steel to keep 
Still, as thou leftest them, thy sheep." 40 

Then Christ sought out an artisan, 
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man, 
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin 
Pushed from her faintly want and sin. 



20 FREEDOM 

These set he in the midst of them, 45 

And as they drew back their garment-hem, 
For fear of defilement, " Lo, here,'' said he, 
" The images ye have made of me ! " 

FREEDOM 

Abe we. then, wholly fallen? Can it be 

That thou. North wind, that from thy mountains 

bringest 
Their spirit to our plains, and thou, blue sea. 
Who on our rocks thy wreaths of freedom flingest. 
As on an altar, — can it be that ye 5 

Have wasted inspiration on dead tar-. 
Dulled witli the too familiar clank of chains'/ 
The pt'o])lc*s heart i- like a liar]) for yean 
I Inn- where some petrifying torrent rains 
Its dow-incrusting -pray : the stiffened chords 10 

Faint and more faint make answer to tin- tears 
That drip upon them: idle are all words: 
Only a golden plectrum wakes the tone 
Deep buried 'neath that ever-thickening stom-. 

We are not tree : doth Freedom, then, consist 16 

In musing with our faces toward the Past, 
While petty cares ami crawling interests twist 
Their spider-threads about as, which at last 

Grow strong BS iron chains, to cramp ami bind 
In formal narrowness heart, booI, and mind? 
Freedom is re-created year by year. 
In hearts wide open on the Qodward ride, 
In Bonis calm-cadenoed a- the whirling spin 
In minds that BWay the future like a tide. 



FREEDOM 21 

No broadest creeds can hold her, and no codes ; 25 

She chooses men for her august abodes, 

Building them fair and fronting to the dawn ; 

Yet, when we seek her, we but find a few 

Light footprints, leading morn-ward through the 

dew: 
Before the day had risen, she was gone. 30 

And we must follow : swiftly runs she on, 

And, if our steps should slacken in despair, 

Half turns her face, half smiles through golden hair, 

Forever yielding, never wholly won : 

That is not love which pauses in the race 35 

Two close-linked names on fleeting sand to trace ; 

Freedom gained yesterday is no more ours ; 

Men gather but dry seeds of last year's flowers ; 

Still there 's a charm ungranted, still a grace, 

Still rosy Hope, the free, the unattained, 40 

Makes us Possession's languid hand let fall ; 

'T is but a fragment of ourselves is gained, 

The Future brings us more, but never all. 

And, as the finder of some unknown realm, 

Mounting a summit whence he thinks to see 45 

On either side of him the imprisoning sea, 

Beholds, above the clouds that overwhelm 

The valley-land, peak after snowy peak 

Stretch out of sight, each like a silver helm 

Beneath its plume of smoke, sublime and bleak, 50 

And what he thought an island finds to be 

A continent to him first oped, — so we 

Can from our height of Freedom look along 

A boundless future, ours if we be strong ; 



22 STANZAS ON FREEDOM 

Or if we shrink, better remount our ships 55 

And, fleeing God's express design, trace back 
The hero-freighted Mayflower's prophet-track 
To Europe entering her blood-red eclipse. 1 

STANZAS ON FREEDOM 

Sung at the anti-slavery picnic in Dedham. on the anniversary of 
West Indian Emancipation. August 1, 1843. 

Men ! whose boast it is that ye 

Come of fathers brave and free, 

If there breathe on earth a slave, 

Are ye truly free and brave ' 

If ye do not feel the chain, 5 

When it works a brother's pain, 

Are ye not base slaves ind< 

Slave- unworthy to be Era 

Women ! who shall <>ii- day bear 

Sons t«» breathe STen England air. 10 

It' ye hear, without a blush, 

Di da to make the roused blood rash 

Like red lava through your vein-. 

For your sisters now in chains, — 

An- tit to be 

Mothers of the brave ami I 

[a true Freedom but to break 

Fetters for our own dear Bake, 
And. with Leathern heart-, forget 

That we owe mankind a debt ? 

1 See Lowell's /-<.'.'«'>'. ii. 96, fot the last purt of this poem 
at- originally written, ami for Lowell's comment. 



BIBLIOLATRES 23 

No ! true Freedom is to share 
All the chains our brothers wear, 
And, with heart and hand, to be 
Earnest to make others free ! 

They are slaves who fear to speak 25 

For the fallen and the weak ; 

They are slaves who will not choose 

Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, 

Rather than in silence shrink 

From the truth they needs must think ; 30 

They are slaves who dare not be 

In the right with two or three. 

BIBLIOLATRES 

Bowing thyself in dust before a Book, 

And thinking the great God is thine alone, 

O rash iconoclast, thou wilt not brook 

What gods the heathen carves in wood and stone, 

As if the Shepherd who from outer cold 5 

Leads all his shivering lambs to one sure fold 

Were careful for the fashion of His crook. 

There is no broken reed so poor and base, 

No rush, the bending tilt of swamp-fly blue, 

But He therewith the ravening wolf can chase, 10 

And guide His flock to springs and pastures new ; 

Through ways unlooked for, and through many lands, 

Far from the rich folds built with human hands, 

The gracious footprints of His love I trace. 

And what art thou, own brother of the clod, 15 

That from His hand the crook would'st snatch away 



24 BIBLIOLA TRES 

And shake instead thy dry and sapless rod. 

To scare the sheep out of the wholesome day ? 

Yea, what art thou, blind, unconverted Jew, 

That with thy idol-volume's covers two 20 

Would'st make a jail to coop the living God ? 

Thou hear'st not well the mountain organ-tones 
By prophet ears from Hor and Sinai caught. 
Thinking the cisterns of those Hebrew brains 
Drew dry the springs of the All-knower's thought, 21 
Nor shall thy lips be touched with living tire. 
Who blow's! old altar-coals with Bole desire 
To weld anew the spirit's broken chain-. 

God is not dumb, that He should speak no more; 

If thou hast wanderings in the wilder: 30 

And find'st DOt Sinai, "t i- thy soul i- p 

There tower- the Mountain of the Voice DO 1 58, 

Which whoso seeks shall find, but he who bends, 

Intent on manna -till and mortal ends, 

Sees it not. oeither hears it- thundered lore. 35 

Slowly the Bible of the race is writ, 

And not on paper leave- nor have- of -tone : 

Each age, each kindred, add- i verse to it. 
Texts of despair or hope, <>i joy or moan. 
While Bwings the sea, while mists the mountain- 
shroud. 

While thunder"- SUTgeS burst OH cliffs of eloiul. 

Still at the prophets 1 feet the nation 



THE PRESENT CMSIS 25 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

[In the year 1844, which is the date of the following poem, 
the question of the annexation of Texas was pending, and it was 
made an issue of the presidential campaign then taking place. 
The anti-slavery party feared and opposed annexation, on account 
of the added strength which it would give to slavery, and the 
South desired it for the same reason.] 

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad 

earth's aching breast 
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east 

to west, 
And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within 

him climb 
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime 
Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem 

of Time. 5 

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instan- 
taneous throe, 

When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to 
and fro ; 

At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start, 

Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips 
apart, 

And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath 
the Future's heart. 10 

So the Evil's triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill, 
Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill, 
And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels his sympathies 
with God 



26 THE PRESENT CRISIS 

In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by 

the sod, 
Till a corpse crawls round unburied. delving in the 

nobler clod. 15 

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along. 
Kound the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of 

right or wrong : 
Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's 

vast frame 
Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy 

or shame ; — 
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal 

claim. 

Once to every man and nation comae tin- moment to 

decide, 
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or 

evil side ; 
Some great cause, God's aew Messiah each 

tlu- bloom 01 blight, 

Parts the goatfl upon tin- left hand, and the sheep 

upon the right, 
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that dark: 

and that tight 

Hast thou chosen, my people, on whose party thou 

shalt stand, 
Eire the Doom from it- worn nandiln shako the dust 

against our land? 

17. This figure has npooill force from the fact tha: I 
telegraph was lirst pat in operation a few n.outh> befon the 

writing of this poem. 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 27 

Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 't is Truth alone 

is strong, 
And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her 

throng 
Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from 

all wrong. ' 30 

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments 

see, 
That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through 

Oblivion's sea ; 
Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding 

cry 
Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose 

feet earth's chaff must fly ; 
Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment 

hath passed by. 35 

Careless seems the great Avenger ; history's pages 

but record 
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems 

and the Word ; 
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the 

throne, — 
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the 

dim unknown, 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above 

his own. 40 

29. Compare 

" Truth crushed to earth shall rise again, 
The eternal years of God are hers." 

Bbyant. 

37. " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
God, and the Word was God." 



28 THE PRESENT CRISIS 

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is 

great, 
Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron 

helm of fate, 
But the soul is still oracular ; amid the market's din. 
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave 

within, — 
" They enslave their children's children who make 

compromise with sin." 45 

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant 

brood. 
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have 

drenched the earth with blond, 
Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer 

dav. 
Gropes in yet onblasted regions far his miserable 

P*«y; — 
Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless 

children play ? 

Then to side with Truth is ooble when we -hare her 

wretched crust, 
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous 

to \n- JUSI : 

Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward 

stands aside, 
Doubting in his abject spirit, till hi> Lord is crucified, 

And the multitude make virtue at the faith they had 
denied. 
50. For the full story of Cyclops, which runs in s 

rough these the lines, sec the ninth hook of :'. 
sey. The translation hv (i. H. Palmer will be found especially 
satisfactory. 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 29 

Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes, — they were souls 
that stood alone, 

While the men they agonized for hurled the contu- 
melious stone, 

Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden 
beam incline 

To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faitli 
divine, 

By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's 
supreme design. 60 

By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet 
I track, 

Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns 
not back, 

And these mounts of anguish number how each genera- 
tion learned 

One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet- 
hearts hath burned 

Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face 
to heaven upturned. 65 

For Humanity sweeps onward : where to-day the martyr 

stands, 
On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his 

hands ; 
Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling 

fagots burn, 
While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe 

return 
To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden 

urn. 70 



30 THE PRESENT CRISIS 

T is as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves 

Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers' graves, 

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light 

a crime : — 
Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by 

men behind their time? 
Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that make 

Plymouth Rock sublime? 75 

They were men of present valor, stalwart old icono- 
clasts, 

Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the 
Past's ; 

But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that 
hath made us free, 

Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender 
spirits flee 

The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them 
across the sea. 80 

They have rights who dare maintain them ; we are trai- 
tors to our sires, 

Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar- 
fires ; 

Shall we make their creed our jailer ? Shall we, in our 
haste to slay, 

From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral 
lamps away 

To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of 
to-day ? 85 

New occasions teach new duties ; Time makes ancient 
good uncouth ; 



TO W. L. GARRISON 31 

They must upward still, and onward, who would keep 
abreast of Truth ; 

Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires ! we ourselves must 
Pilgrims be. 

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the 
desperate winter sea, 

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood- 
rusted key. 90 

TO W. L. GARRISON 

" Some time afterward, it was reported to me by the city officers 
that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor ; that his office 
was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his 
supporters a few very insignificant persons of all colors." — Letter of 
H. G. Otis. 

In a small chamber, friendless and unseen, 

Toiled o'er his types one poor, unlearned young 
man ; 

The place was dark, unfurnitured, and mean ; — 
Yet there the freedom of a race began. 

Help came but slowly ; surely no man yet 5 

Put lever to the heavy world with less : 

What need of help ? He knew how types were set, 
He had a dauntless spirit, and a press. 

Such earnest natures are the fiery pith, 

The compact nucleus, round which systems grow; 10 
Mass after mass becomes inspired therewith, 

And whirls impregnate with the central glow. 

6. Archimedes, a great philosopher of antiquity, used to say, 
" Only give me a place to stand on, and I will move the world 
with my lever." 



32 TO W. L. GARRISON 

O Truth. ! O Freedom ! how are ye still born 
In the rude stable, in the manger nursed ! 

What humble hands unbar those gates of morn 15 
Through which the splendors of the New Day 
burst ! 

What! shall one monk, scarce known beyond his 
cell, 
Front Rome's far-reaching bolts, and scorn her 
frown ? 
Brave Luther answered Yi> ; that thunder's swell 
Rocked Europe, and disc-harmed the triple crown. _'0 

Whatever can be known of earth we know. 

Sneered Europe's wise men, in their snail-shells 
curled ; 

No! said one man in Genoa, and that No 
Out of the dark created thifl New World. 

Who is it will not dare himself to trust 
Who is it hath not strength to stand alo 

Who IS it thwarts and bilkfi the inward MUSI 

He and his works, like sand, from earth are blown. 

Men of a thousand >hit'ts and wiles, look here I 

Sec one straightforward oonseienoe put in pawn 30 
To win a world : Bee the obedient -; 

\\\ bravery's simple gravitation drawn ! 

Shall we not heed the leSSOD taught oi old. 

And by the Present's Hps repeated still. 
In our own single manhood to be bold. 

Fortressed in oonseienoe and impregnable will / 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 33 

We stride the river daily at its spring, 

Nor, in our childish thoughtlessness, foresee, 

What myriad vassal streams shall tribute bring, 
How like an equal it shall greet the sea. 40 

small beginnings, ye are great and strong, 
Based on a faithful heart and weariless brain ! 

Ye build the future fair, ye conquer wrong, 
Ye earn the crown, and wear it not in vain. 

WENDELL PHILLIPS 

He stood upon the world's broad threshold ; wide 

The din of battle and of slaughter rose ; 

He saw God stand upon the weaker side, 

That sank in seeming loss before its foes : 

Many there were who made great haste and sold 5 

Unto the cunning enemy their swords, 

He scorned their gifts of fame, and power, and gold, 

And, underneath their soft and flowery words, 

Heard the cold serpent hiss ; therefore he went 

And humbly joined him to the weaker part, 10 

Fanatic named, and fool, yet well content 

So he could be the nearer to God's heart, 

And feel its solemn pulses sending blood 

Through all the widespread veins of endless good. 



34 RELATED POEMS — GROUP B 



POEMS HAYING A SPECIAL RELATION TO 
THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL. GROUP B ■ 

" Indeed, there could scarcely have been a better nesting 
place for one who was all his life long to love the animation 
of nature and to portray in verse and prose its homely and 
friendly aspects rather than its large, solemn, and expansive 
scenes. . . . From the upper windows of the house — that 
tower of enchantment for many a child — he could see a 
long curve of the Charles, the wide marshes beyond the 
river, and the fields which lay between Elm wood and the 
village of Cambridge. Within the place it-elf were the rose- 
bushes and asters, the heavy headed goafs-beard, the lilac 
bushes and syringas which bordered the path from 
to what his father, in New England phrase, called the 
avenue, and which later became formally Elmwood Avenue. 
. . . And in the trees and bushes sang the birds that were 
to be his companions tin- the buttercups 

whistled the orioles ; and bobolink-, catbirds, lin: 
robins were to teach him QOt» B, — 

Hie Aladdin's trap-door of the past to lift. 

ing morning which witnessed the sadden miracle of 
regeneration: an hour of summer, when he sat dappled with 
sunshine, in a eh. Try-: n e ; a day in autumn, when the fall- 
in-- leaves moved a- an accompaniment to his thought: the 
creaking of the snow beneath his feet, when the familiar 
world was bras i a polar solitude : — 

In-Knit tin- oandid I i>rain 

Ami later \ Worn mi m i • 

From thoM unfading EnaOOB of tl. 

YVhieli I. TOUg WVagB, in my aire of Hint. 

A at. and diml\ felt a power in rue 

d from nature by the joy in her 
That doubtfully revealed me to n 

Send : C tceiL 

1 See The Study or 



BEAVER BROOK 35 



BEAVER BROOK 



Hushed with broad sunlight lies the hill, 
And, minuting the long day's loss, 
The cedar's shadow, slow and still, 
Creeps o'er its dial of gray moss. 

Warm noon brims full the valley's cup, 5 

The aspen's leaves are scarce astir ; 
Only the little mill sends up 
Its busy, never-ceasing burr. 

Climbing the loose-piled wall that hems 

The road along the mill-pond's brink, 10 

From 'neath the arching barberry-stems 

My footstep scares the shy chewink. 

Beneath a bony buttonwood 

The mill's red door lets forth the din ; 

The whitened miller, dust-imbued, 15 

Flits past the square of dark within. 

No mountain torrent's strength is here ; 

Sweet Beaver, child of forest still, 

Heaps its small pitcher to the ear, 

And gently waits the miller's will. 20 

Swift slips Undine along the race 
Unheard, and then, with flashing bound, 
Floods the dull wheel with light and grace, 
And, laughing, hunts the loath drudge round. 

18. Beaver Brook was within walking distance of the poet's 
home. See The Nightingale in the Study and Mr. Hosea Biglow 
to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly. 



36 BEAVER BROOK 

The miller dreams not at what cost 25 

The quivering millstones hum and whirl, 
Nor how for every turn are tost 
Armfuls of diamond and of pearl. 

But Summer cleared my happier eyes 

With drops of some celestial juice, 30 

To see how Beauty underlies, 

Forevermore each form of use. 

And more ; methought I saw that flood. 
Which now so dull and darkling steals, 
Thick, here and there, with human blood. 35 
To turn the worlds laborious wheels. 

No more than doth the miller there, 
Shut in our several cells, |! 
Know with what waste of beauty rare 
Mow- every day's machinery. 

Surely the wiser time -hall come 
When this fine overplus of might, 
No longer sullen. -low. and dumb. 
Shall Leap to music and to light. 

In that oew childhood oi the Earth 

Life oi it-iit' -hall dance and play. 

Fresh blood in Tina's shrunk veins make mirth. 

And labor meet delight half-way. 



AL FRESCO 37 



AL FRESCO 

"The Mill," 1841). 

The dandelions and buttercups 

Gild all the lawn ; the drowsy bee 

Stumbles among the clover-tops, 

And summer sweetens all but me : 

Away, unfruitful lore of books, 5 

For whose vain idiom we reject 

The soul's more native dialect, 

Aliens among the birds and brooks, 

Dull to interpret or conceive 

What gospels lost the woods retrieve! 10 

Away, ye critics, city-bred, 

Who springes set of thus and so, 

And in the first man's footsteps tread, 

Like those who toil through drifted snow ! 

Away, my poets, whose sweet spell 15 

Can make a garden of a cell ! 

I need ye not, for I to-day 

Will make one long sweet verse of play. 

Snap, chord of manhood's tenser strain ! 
To-day I will be a boy again ; 20 

The mind's pursuing element, 
Like a bow slackened and unbent, 
In some dark corner shall be leant. 
The robin sings, as of old, from the limb ! 
The catbird croons in the lilac bush ! 25 

15. There is a delightful pair of poems by Wordsworth, Expos- 
tulation and Reply, and The Tables Turned, which show how 
another poet treats books and nature. 



38 AL FRESCO 

Through the dim arbor, himself more dim, 

Silently hops the hermit-thrush, 

The withered leaves keep dumb for him ; 

The irreverent buccaneering bee 

Hath stormed and rifled the nunnery 30 

Of the lily, and scattered the sacred floor 

With haste-dropt gold from shrine to door : 

There, as of yore. 

The rich, milk-tingeing buttercup 

Its tiny polished urn holds up. 35 

Filled with ripe summer to the edge, 

The sun in his own wine to pledge ; 

And our tall elm, this hundredth year 

Doge of our leafy Venice here, 

Who. with an annual ring, doth wed 40 

The blue Adiiatie overhead. 

Shadows with his palatial mass 
The deep canals of floro 

( ) anestranged birds and I 
O face of Nature always true ! 45 

() aever-unsympathizing I n 
() never-rejecting roof of blue, 
Whose rash disherison never falls 
On u^ unthinking pro 
Yet who convicted all our ill. 
So grand ami unappeasable ! 

Methinks my heart from each of these 

Plucks pari oi childhood back again, 
Long there imprisoned, as the bi 

Doth every hidden odor a 

Of wood and water, hill and plain : 

Once more am I admitted peer 



AL FRESCO 39 

In the upper house of Nature here, 
And feel through all my pulses run 
The royal blood of breeze and sun. 60 

Upon these elm -arched solitudes 
No hum of neighbor toil intrudes ; 
The only hammer that I hear 
Is wielded by the woodpecker, 
The single noisy calling his 65 

In all our leaf -hid Sybaris ; 
The good old time, close-hidden here, 
Persists, a loyal cavalier, 
While Roundheads prim, with point of fox, 
Probe wainscot-chink and empty box ; 70 

Here no hoarse-voiced iconoclast 
Insults thy statues, royal Past ; 
Myself too prone the axe to wield, 
I touch the silver side of the shield 
With lance reversed, and challenge peace, 75 
A willing convert of the trees. 

How chanced it that so long I tost 
A cable's length from this rich coast, 
With foolish anchors hugging close 
The beckoning weeds and lazy ooze, 80 

Nor had the wit to wreck before 
On this enchanted island's shore, 
Whither the current of the sea, 
With wiser drift, persuaded me? 

O, might we but of such rare days 85 

Build up the spirit's dwelling-place ! 



40 AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 

A temple of so Parian stone 

Would brook a marble god alone, 

The statue of a perfect life, 

Far-shrined from earth's bestaining strife. 90 

Alas ! though such felicity 

In our vext world here may not be. 

Yet, as sometimes the peasant's hut 

Shows stones which old religion cut 

With text inspired, or mystic sign 95 

Of the Eternal and Divine, 

Torn from the consecration deep 

Of some fallen nunnery's mossy sleep. 

So, from the ruin- of this day 

Crumbling in golden dust away. 100 

The soul one gracious block may draw. 

Carved with some fragment of the law, 

Which, set in life's prosaic wall. 

Old benedictions may recall. 

Ami lure some ounlike thoughts to take 

Their dwelling here for memory's Bake. 



AN INDIAN SUMMEB REVERIE 

[When Mr. Lowell WTOto this poem he WU living at Elm- 
wood in Cambridge, :it that time quite remote from town inrlu- 
enees, — Cambridge itself being scarcely more I 

but dow rapidly losing its rustic surrounding-*. The Charles 
River flowed near bj, then a limpid stream, untroubled by 
Factories or Bewage. It is ;\ tidal river and not far from Elm- 
wood winds through broad salt man 

home is :l short stroll nearer town, and the two poeta exchanged 
pleasant shots. :is maj H. W. I . and 

Longfellow's 7 

Mr. Lowell has. as it were, indulged in another r 
period of his life, among the >ame familiar surroundings.] 



,17V INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 41 

What visionary tints the year puts on, 
When falling leaves falter through motionless air 

Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone ! 
How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, 

As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills 5 

The bowl between me and those distant hills, 
And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair! 

No more the landscape holds its wealth apart, 
Making me poorer in my poverty, 

But mingles with my senses and my heart ; 10 
My own projected spirit seems to me 
In her own reverie the world to steep ; 
'T is she that waves to sympathetic sleep, 
Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and tree. 

How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees, 15 
Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms, 

Each into each, the hazy distances ! 
The softened season all the landscape charms ; 

Those hills, my native village that embay, 

In waves of dreamier purple roll away, 20 

And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms. 

Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee 
Close at my side ; far distant sound the leaves ; 

The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory 
Wanders like gleaning Ruth ; and as the sheaves 25 
Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye 
Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by, 
So tremble and seem remote all things the sense re- 
ceives. 



42 AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 

The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn, 
Passed breezily on by all his flappiDg mates. 30 

Faint and more faint, froni barn to barn is borne, 
Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits : 

Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails ; 

Silently overhead the hen-hawk sails, 
With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits. 

The sobered robin, hunger-silent now, 36 

Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer ; 

The chipmunk, on the shingly shagbark's bough. 
Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear. 
Then drops his nut. and. with a chipping bound. 40 
\\ hisks to hi> winding fastness underground; 
The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmos- 
phere. 

O'er yon ban* knoll the pointed cedar shad 
Drowse on the crisp, gray moss ; the pkmghmai 

Creeps faint as smoke Erom black, rresh-furrowed 
meadows ; 
The single crow a single caw lets mil ; 

And all around me every bush and b 

Say- Autumn 's here, and Winter soon will be, 

Who snows his Boft, white sleep and sflenee over all. 

The birch, most Bhy and ladylike oi trees, 
Her poverty, as best Bhe may. retrien s, 

And hints at her foregone gentilities 

With some sayed relics of her wealth of lev 
The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, 

Glares red SS blood across the sinking sun. 

As one who proudlier to a falling fortune eh 



AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 43 

lit* looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapt, 
Who, 'mid some couneil of the sad-garbed whites, 

Ereet and stern, in his own memories lapt, 
With distant eye broods over other sights, 00 

Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace, 

The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace, 
And roams the savage Past of his undwindled rights. 

The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost, 
And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry, 65 

After the first betrayal of the frost, 
Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky ; 

The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold, 

To the faint Summer, beggared now and old, 69 
Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favoring eye. 

The ash her purple drops forgivingly 
And sadly, breaking not the general hush ; 

The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea, 
Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush ; 

All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting 
blaze 75 

Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days, 
Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush. 

O'er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, 
Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine 
Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant 
stone 80 

Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, 

The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, 

weaves 
A prickly network of ensanguined leaves ; 
Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine. 



44 AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 

Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary. So 
Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the ploughboy's 
foot, 
Who, with each sense shut fast except the eve. 
Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot, 
The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires. 
Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal firea : 90 

In the ivy's paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute. 

Below, the ( Hharles, a stripe of nether sky. 
Now hid by rounded apple-trees between. 

Whose gaps the misplaced -ail sweeps bellyii a 
Now flickering golden through a woodland screen, 95 
Then spreading <>ut. at his next tarn beyond. 
A silver circle like an inland pond — 
Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and 

green. 

Dear marshes] vain to him the gift of sight 
Who cannot in their various incomes -hare. ioo 

Prom every season drawn, of shade and light, 
Who sees in them but levels brown and bare : 

Bach change of storm or sunshine scatters free 

( )n them it- largess of variety, 
For Nature wit h cheap mean- -till works her wonder- 

rare, 105 

In Spring they lie one broad expanse of gn 
O'er which the light wind- run with glimmering 

feet : 

Here, yellower -tripe- track out the creek un 
seen, 
There, darker growths o'er hidden ditches meet : 



AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 45 

And purpler stains show where the blossoms 
crowd, 1 10 

As if the silent shadow of a cloud 
Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet. 

All round, upon the river's slippery edge, 
Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide, 

Whispers and leans the breeze - entangling 
sedge; 115 

Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide, 
Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun, 
And the stiff banks in eddies melt and run 
Of dimpling light, and with the current seem to 
glide. 

In Summer 't is a blithesome sight to see, 120 
As, step by step, with measured swing, they pass, 

The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee, 

Their sharp scythes panting through the wiry grass ; 

Then, stretched beneath a rick's shade in a ring, 

Their nooning take, while one begins to sing 125 

A stave that droops and dies 'neath the close sky of 

brass. 

Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, 
Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops 

Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous 
brink, 
And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops, 130 
A decorous bird of business, who provides 
For his brown mate and fledglings six besides, 
And looks from right to left, a farmer 'mid his 
crops. 



46 AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 

Another change subdues them in the Fall. 
But saddens not; they still show merrier tints. 135 

Though sober russet seems to cover all ; 
When the first sunshine through their dewdrops 
glints, 
Look how the yellow clearness, streamed across. 
Redeems with rarer hues the season's loss, 
As Dawn's feet there had touched and left their rosy 
prints. I4(i 

Or come when sunset gives its freshened /. 
Lean o'er the bridge and let the ruddy thrill. 

While the shorn sun swells down the hazy west, 
Glow opposite; — the marshes drink their fill 
And swoon witli purple vein-, then slowly fad 
Through pink to brown, as eastward motes the 
shade 
Lengthening with stealthy creep, of Simond's darken- 
ing hill. 

Later, and yet ere Winter wholly shuts, 
Kit through the first dry snow the rum 

And tlie Loath cart-wheel screams in slippery 
ruts. 150 

While firmer ice the eager boy awaits, 

Tr\in-- each buckle and >tr:q> beside tfo 

And until bedtime plays with his desire. 

Twenty tunes putting on and ofi his Dew-bought 
skates ; — 

Then, every morn, the river's banks shine 
bright 156 

With smooth plate-armor, treaeherous and trail. 



AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 47 

By the frost's clinking hammers forged at night, 
'Gainst which the lances of the sun prevail, 
Giving a pretty emblem of the day 
When guiltier arms in light shall melt away, 160 
And states shall move free-limbed, loosed from war's 
cramping mail. 

And now those waterfalls the ebbing river 
Twice every day creates on either side 

Tinkle, as through their fresh-sparred grots they 
shiver 
In grass-arched channels to the sun denied ; 165 
High flaps in sparkling blue the far -heard crow, 
The silvered flats gleam frostily below, 
Suddenly drops the gull and breaks the glassy tide. 

But crowned in turn by vying seasons three, 
Their winter halo hath a fuller ring; 170 

This glory seems to rest immovably, — 
The others were too fleet and vanishing ; 
When the hid tide is at its highest flow, 
O'er marsh and stream one breathless trance of 
snow 174 

With brooding fulness awes and hushes everything. 

The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind, 
As pale as formal candles lit by day; 

Gropes to the sea the river dumb and blind ; 
The brown ricks, snow-thatched by the storm in play, 
Show pearly breakers combing o'er their lee, 180 
White crests as of some just enchanted sea, 
Checked in their maddest leap and hanging poised 
midway. 



48 AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 

But when the eastern blow, with rain aslant, 
From mid-sea's prairies green and rolling plains 

Drives in his wallowing herds of billows gaunt. 185 
And the roused Charles remembers in his veins 

Old Ocean's blood and snaps his gyves of frost. 

That tyrannous silence on the shores is tost 
In dreary wreck, and crumbling desolation reigns. 

Edgewise or flat, in Druid-like device, 190 

With leaden pools between or gullies bare. 

The blocks lie strewn, a bleak Stonehenge of ice \ 
No life, no sound, to break the grim despair, 
Save sullen plunge, as through the sedges stiff 
Down crackles riverward Boms thaw-sapped cliff, 
Or when the close-wedged fields o! ice crunch b 

there. 196 

But let me turn from fancy-pictured scenes 
To that whose pastoral calm before me lies: 

Here nothing harsh i 
The early evening with her mistj 200 

Smooths off the ravelled edges of the 1 

Relieves the distant with her cooler sky, 
And tones the landscape down, and BOOthefl the wearied 

eyes. 

There gleams my native village, dear to me, 
Though higher change's waves each daj 

Whelming fields famed in boyhood's history, 
Sanding with houses the diminisl 

There, in red brick, which softening time d< 
Stand square and stiff the Muses" Factories : — 
How with my life knit up is every well-known scene ! 



AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 49 

Blow on, dear river ! not alone you flow 21 1 

To outward sight, and through your marshes wind ; 

Fed from the mystic springs of long-ago, 
Your twin flows silent through my world of mind : 

Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray ! 

Before my inner sight ye stretch away, 216 

And will forever, though these fleshly eyes grow blind. 

Beyond the hillock's house-bespotted swell, 
Where Gothic chapels house the horse and chaise, 

Where quiet cits in Grecian temples dwell, 220 

Where Coptic tombs resound with prayer and praise, 

Where dust and mud the equal year divide, 

There gentle Allston lived, and wrought, and 

died, 

Transfiguring street and shop with his illumined gaze. 

Virgilium vidi tantu?n, — I have seen 225 

But as a boy, who looks alike on all, 

That misty hair, that fine Undine-like mien, 
Tremulous as down to feeling's faintest call ; — 

Ah, dear old homestead ! count it to thy fame 

That thither many times the Painter came ; — 
One elm yet bears his name, a feathery tree and tall. 231 

223. In Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, which treats in prose of 
much the same period as this poem reproduces, Mr. Lowell has 
given more in detail his recollections of Washington Allston, the 
painter. The whole paper may be read as a prose counterpart to 
this poem. It is published in Fireside Travels. 

225. Virgilium vidi tantum, I barely saw Virgil, a Latin phrase 
applied to one who has merely had a glimpse of a great man. 

227. Undine is the heroine of a romantic tale by Baron De la 
Motte Fouque. She is represented as a water-nymph who wins 
a human soul only by a union with mortality which brings pain 
and sorrow. 



50 AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 

Swiftly the present fades in memory's glow, — 
Our only sure possession is the past : 

The village blacksmith died a month ago, 
And dim to me the forge's roaring blast ; 235 

Soon fire-new mediaevals we shall see 
Oust the black smithy from its chestnut-tree, 
And that hewn down, perhaps, the bee-hive green and 
vast. 

How many times, prouder than king on throne. 
Loosed from the village school-dame's As and B's. 

Panting have I the creaky bellows blown, 24 1 
And watched the pent volcano's ise, 

Then paused to Bee the ponderous sledge, brought 

down 
By that hard arm voluminous and brown. 24! 

From the white iron Bwann it- golden vanishing 

Dear native town ! who-.- thinking elms 

year 
With eddying dust before their time turn gray, 

Pining for rain. to me thy dns 
It glorifies the 

And when the westering sun half -union burns. 
The mote-thick air to mis, 

The westward horseman rides through clouds 
away. 

So palpable, I *ve seen those unshorn few, 

The six old willows at the causeys end 

234. The village blacksmith of Longfellow's well-km 
The prophecy oatne true as regards the hewing-down of the 
chestnut-tree, which was ent down in 1S76. 



,4 A" INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE 51 

(Such trees Paul Potter never dreamed nor 
drew), 255 

Through this dry mist their checkering shadows 
send, 

Striped, here and there, with many a long-drawn 
thread, 

Where streamed through leafy chinks the trem- 
bling red, 
Past which, in one bright trail, the hangbird's flashes 
blend. 

Yes, dearer far thy dust than all that e'er, 260 
Beneath the awarded crown of victory, 

Gilded the blown Olympic charioteer ; 
Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments 
three, 
Yet collegisse juvat, I am glad 
That here what colleging was mine I had, — 265 
It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee ! 

Nearer art thou than simply native earth, 
My dust with thine concedes a deeper tie ; 

A closer claim thy soil may well put forth, 
Something of kindred more than sympathy ; 270 

For in thy bounds I reverently laid away 

That blinding anguish of forsaken clay, 
That title I seemed to have in earth and sea and sky, 

264. Collegisse juvat. Horace in his first ode says, Curriculo 
pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat ; that is, It 's a pleasure to 
have collected the dust of Olympus on your carriage-wheels. Mr. 
Lowell, helping himself to the words, says, " It 's a pleasure to 
have been at college;" for college in its first meaning is a col- 
lection of men, as in the phrase " The college of cardinals." 



52 HEBE 

That portion of my life more choice to me 
(Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole) 275 

Than all the imperfect residue can be ; — 
The Artist saw his statue of the soul 

Was perfect ; so, with one regretful stroke, 
The earthen model into fragments broke. 
And without her the impoverished seasons roll. 280 



HEBE 

I saw the twinkle of white feet, 
I saw the flash of robes descending; 

Before her ran an influence fleet. 
That bowed my heart tike barley bending. 

As, in ban- fields, the searching bees 5 

Pilot to bloom- beyond our finding. 

It led me <>n. b] 
Joy's simple honey-cells onbinding. 

Those Graces were thi I 
With oearer lore the alg ' 10 

The Long-s 
On musical hing me, 

1 saw the brimmed bowl in her grasp 
Thrilling with godhood ; like a lover 

I Bprang the proffered life to clasp : — 15 

Tlu- beaker Cell; the luck was over. 

•JT."). The volume continuing tlii- poem was reverently dedi- 
cated "To tin and Inppj memory of our little 

Blanche. " 



THE OAK 53 

The Earth has drunk the vintage up ; 
What boots it pateh the goblet's splinters ? 

Can Summer fill the icy cup, 
Whose treacherous crystal is but Winter's ? 20 

O spendthrift haste! await the Gods; 
Their nectar crowns the lips of Patience ; 

Haste scatters on unthankful sods 
The immortal gift in vain libations. 

Coy Hebe flies from those that woo, 25 

And shuns the hands would seize upon her ; 

Follow thy life, and she will sue 
To pour for thee the cup of honor. 

THE OAK 

What gnarled stretch, what depth of shade, is his ! 

There needs no crown to mark the forest's king ; 
How in his leaves outshines full summer's bliss ! 

Sun, storm, rain, dew, to him their tribute bring, 
Which he with such benignant royalty 5 

Accepts, as overpayeth what is lent ; 
All nature seems his vassal proud to be, 

And cunning only for his ornament. 

How towers he, too, amid the billowed snows, 

An un quelled exile from the summer's throne, 10 
Whose plain, uncinctured front more kingly shows, 

Now that the obscuring courtier leaves are flown. 
His boughs make music of the winter air, 

Jewelled with sleet, like some cathedral front 
Where clinging snow-flakes with quaint art repair 15 

The dints and furrows of time's envious brunt. 



54 THE OAK 

How doth his patient strength the rude March wind 

Persuade to seem glad breaths of summer breeze. 
And win the soil that fain would be unkind. 

To swell his revenues with proud increase ! 20 

He is the gem ; and all the landscape wide 

(So doth his grandeur isolate the sensej 
Seems but the setting, worthless all beside. 

An empty socket, were he fallen thence. 

So, from oft converse with life's wintry g 25 

Should man learn how t<> clasp with tougher roots 
The inspiring earth : how otherwise avails 

The Leaf-creating sap that sunward shoots? 
So every year that bills with noiseless flake 

Shoidd nil old scars ap on the stormward -ide, 30 
And make hoar a s 

Not for traditions of youth's leafy pride. 

So. from the pinched soil of a churlish fate. 

True hearts compel the Bap of sturdier growth, 
So between earth and heaven stand simply great, 35 

That these shall seem hut their attendants l>«»tli : 
For nature's forces with obedient seal 

Wait on the rooted faith and oaken will ; 
Ajb quickly the pretender's cheat they feel. 

And turn mad Pucks to flout and mock bimstilL to 

Lord ! all Thy works are Lessons : each contains 
Some emblem of man's all-containing soul ; 

Shall he make fruitless all Thy glorious pains, 
Delving within Thy grace an eyi I 

U» See Shakespeare's A Midsummer Sight's Dream. 



THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION 55 

Make me the least of thy Dodona-grove, 45 

Cause me some message of thy truth to bring, 

Speak but a word through me, nor let thy love 
Among my boughs disdain to perch and sing. 

THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION 

" The Commemoration services (July 21, 1865) took 
place in the open air, in the presence of a great assembly. 
Prominent among the speakers were Major-General Meade, 
the hero of Gettysburg, and Major-General Devens. The 
wounds of the war were still fresh and bleeding, and the 
interest of the occasion was deep and thrilling. The sum- 
mer afternoon was drawing to its close when the poet began 
the recital of the ode. No living audience could for the 
first time follow with intelligent appreciation the delivery 
of such a poem. To be sure, it had its obvious strong points 
and its sonorous charms ; but, like all the later poems of the 
author, it is full of condensed thought and requires study. 
The reader to-day finds many passages whose force and 
beauty escaped him during the recital, yet the effect of the 
poem at the time was overpowering. The face of the poet, 
always singularly expressive, was on this occasion almost 
transfigured, — glowing, as if with an inward light. It was 
impossible to look away from it. Our age has furnished 
many great historic scenes, but this Commemoration com- 
bined the elements of grandeur and pathos, and produced an 
impression as lasting as life. Of the merits of the ode it is 
perhaps too soon to speak. In nobility of sentiment and 
sustained power it appears to take rank among the first in 
the language. To us, with the memories of the war in mind, 
it seems more beautiful and of a finer quality than the best 
of Dryden's. What the people of the coming centuries 
will say, who knows? We only know that the auditors, 

45. A grove of oaks at Dodona, in ancient Greece, was the 
seat of a famous oracle. 



56 THE HARVARD COMMEMORATIOX 

scholars and soldiers alike, were dissolved in admiration 
and tears." — Underwood's James Russell Lou-ell. 

The chapter entitled " Lowell and the War for the Union " 
in Scudder's Biography of Lowell should be read as an 
introduction to the study of the Commemoration Ode. A 
passage in one of Lowell's letters. 8 December, 1868. reveals 
the mood in which the poem was written and the intensity 
of feeling that inspired it. The letter was addressed to the 
author of a review of the volume of verse which included 
the ode, and the passage reads as follows : — 

" I am not sure if I understand what you say about the 
tenth strophe. You will observe that it leads naturally to 
the eleventh, and that I there justify a certain narrowness 
in it as an expression of the popular feeling as well as my 
own. I confess I have never got over the feeling of wrath 
with which (jnst after the death of my nephew Willie ■ I 
read in an English paper that nothing was to be hoped of 
an army officered by tailor'- apprentices and hutch 
The poem was written frith a vehement speed, which I 
thought I had l">t in th< 

Till within two days of tin celebration I was 1: 
dumb, and then it all came with a rush, literally ma 
lean | M j 

getting over it. I i : bw (eleventh) 

Strophe to my mind than in wril of my poem. 

In that I hardly changed deliber- 

ate that I did not find out till after it was printed th 
of the verses lacked corresponding rhymes. ... I had put 

the ethical and political \ i 

weary of it. The motives of the war: I had impatiently 
urged them again and again, — bat for an ode they moat 
be in the blood and not the memory." 

In 1886, in a letter to EL W. Gilder. Lowell d 
the composition of this ode and the effect of the etV 
himself. He >ay< : — 

" The passage about Lincoln was not in the ode 
nally recited, but added immediately aftei 




LOWELL IN HIS OXFORD GOWN 



THE 11 AIL YARD COMMEMORATION 57 

eighteen months before, however, I had written about Lin- 
coln in the North American Review — an article which 
pleased him. I did divine him earlier than most men of 
the Brahmin caste. The ode itself was an improvisation. 
Two days before the Commemoration I had told my friend 
Child that it was impossible — that I was dull as a door- 
mat. But the next day something gave me a jog and the 
whole thing came out of me with a rush. I sat up all night 
writing it out clear, and took it on the morning of the day 
to Child. ' I have something, but don't yet know what it 
is, or whether it will do. Look at it and tell me.' He 
went a little way apart with it under an elm-tree in the 
college yard. He read a passage here and there, brought 
it back to me, and said, ' Do ? I should think so ! Don't 
you be scared.' And I was n't, but virtue enough had gone 
out of me to make me weak for a fortnight after. I was 
amazed at the praises I got. Trevelyan told me afterwards 
that he never could have carried through the abolition of 
purchase in the British Army but for the reinforcement he 
got from that poem." 

The study of the versification of Commemoration Ode 
reveals many of Lowell's theories in regard to the adapta- 
tion of measures, stanzaic forms, etc., to the spirit of the 
poem, on the one hand, and on the other to the manner of 
his presentation. He believed that an author in composing 
his verses must adapt his measures to recitation, that is to 
the ear ; or to the eye, that is to reading, as the case might 
be. The Memorial Odes were composed for recitation, and 
the poet's own words best disclose how this purpose in- 
fluenced him in the selection and adaptation of conventional 
verse forms. He writes : — 

"The poems [Three Memorial Poems] were all intended 
for public recitation. That was the first thing to be con- 
sidered. I suppose my ear (from long and painful practice 
on poems) has more technical practice in this than almost 
any. The least tedious measure is the rhymed heroic, but 
this, too, palls unless relieved by passages of wit or even 



58 THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION 

mere fun. A long series of uniform stanzas (I am always 
speaking of public recitation) with regularly recurring 
rhymes produces somnolence among the men and a des- 
perate resort to their fans on the part of the women. No 
method has yet been invented by which the train of thought 
or feeling can be shunted off from the epical to the lyrical 
track. My ears have been jolted often enough over the 
sleepers on such occasions to know that. I know something 
(of course an American can't know much) about Pindar. 
But his odes had the advantage of being chanted. N 
my problem was to contrive a measure which should not 
be tedious by uniformity, which should vary with varying 
moods, in which the transitions (including those of the 
voice) should be managed without jar. I at fir<t thought 
of mixed rhymed and blank verses of unequal measures, like 
those in the choi bich are in 

thf main masterly. Of course, Milton deliberately dej u 
from that stricter form of Greek Chorus to which r 
hound quite as m 

mpanimenl as by ray » mmetry. I \ 

some stansas of the ( 

at first, lea'. 

my ear was better pleased irhei the rhyme, ejoming at a 
Longer interval, u cho rather than i: - 

Deration, prodaced the 

grateful by unexpectedly recalling sj . and faint 

reminiscence of t >na manee. I think I hart 

pretty well, and if you will trj 

would agree with me."* 

gested by Lowell bat never incorporated in t' 

Letters, ii, 141— 14.*>. Another description of this - 

will be found in A. V G. Allen's 

Phillips Brook*, i. 552. The prayer of Philli 

seemed to those present the g of the day, the 

noblest expression of the rita Bed emotioi 

stirred the heart- of all. 



THE COMMEMORATION ODE 59 



ODE RECITED AT THE HARVARD 
COMMEMORATION 

DEDICATED 

' To the ever sweet and shining memory of the ninety-three sons of Harvard 

College who have died for their country in the war of nationality." 



Weak-winged is song, 
Nor aims at that clear-ethered height 
Whither the brave deed climbs for light : 
We seem to do them wrong, 
Bringing our robin' s-leaf to deck their hearse 5 

Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse, 
Our trivial song to honor those who come 
With ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum, 
And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire, 
Live battle-odes whose lines were steel and fire : 10 

Yet sometimes feathered words are strong, 
A gracious memory to buoy up and save 
From Lethe's dreamless ooze, the common grave 
Of the unventurous throng. 



To-day our Reverend Mother welcomes back 15 

Her wisest Scholars, those who understood 
The deeper teaching of her mystic tome, 

And offered their fresh lives to make it good : 
No lore of Greece or Rome, 
No science peddling with the names of things, 20 

Or reading stars to find inglorious fates, 

Can lift our life with wings 
Far from Death's idle gulf that for the many waits, 
And lengthen out our dates 



60 THE COMMEMORATION ODE 

With that clear fame whose memory sings 25 

In manly hearts to come, and nerves them and dilates : 
Nor such thy teaching, Mother of us all ! 

Not such the trumpet-call 

Of thy diviner mood, 

That could thy sons entice 30 

From happy homes and toils, the fruitful nest 
Of those half-virtues which the world calls best, 

Into War's tumult rude ; 

But rather far that Btern device 
The sponsors chose that round thy cradle stood 36 

In tlic dim. onventured wood, 

The Veritas that Lurks beneath 

The letter's unprolific sheath, 
Life of whatever makes life worth living, 
Seed-grain of high emprise, Immortal food, 40 

One heavenly thing whereof earth hath the giving. 



Many Loved Truth, and lavished life's best <>il 

Amid the dust of books to find her, 
Content at la>t. for guerdon of their toil. 

With the cast mantle she hath left behind heo 
Many in Bad faith BOUghl for her. 
Many with crossed hand- sighed tor her; 
Bui these, our brothers, fought for her, 
At Life's dear peril wrought for her, 

So loved her that they died for her. 

Tasting the raptured fleetn 

Of her divine OOmplet 

ST. An early emblem of Harvard Coll j a Id with 

Veritas (truth) upon three open books. Thi> 
used. 



THE COMMEMORATION ODE 61 

Their higher instinct knew 
Those love her best who to themselves are true, 
And what they dare to dream of, dare to do ; 5S 

They followed her and found her 

Where all may hope to find, 
Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind, 
But beautiful, with danger's sweetness round her. 

Where faith made whole with deed 60 

Breathes its awakening breath 

Into the lifeless creed, 

They saw her plumed and mailed, 

With sweet, stern face unveiled, 
And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death. 65 



Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides 
Into the silent hollow of the past ; 

What is there that abides 
To make the next age better for the last ? 

Is earth too poor to give us 70 

Something to live for here that shall outlive us ? 
Some more substantial boon 
Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle 
moon? 
The little that we see 

From doubt is never free ; 75 

The little that we do 
Is but half-nobly true ; 
With our laborious hiving 
What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, 
Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, 80 

Only secure in every one's conniving, 
A long account of nothings paid with loss, 



62 THE COMMEMORATION ODE 

Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires. 

After our little hour of strut and rave, 
With all our pasteboard passions and desires, 85 

Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, 

Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. 

But stay ! no age was e'er degenerate. 

Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, 

For in our likeness still we shape our fate. 9(1 

Ah, there is something here 

Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, 

Something that gives our feeble light 

A high immunity from Night, 

Something that leaps life's narrow 95 

To claim its birthright with the busts of heaven : 

A Beed of Bunshine that can leaven 
Our earthy dolness with the beams of stars, 

Ami glorify our claj 
With light from fountains elder than the Day: 100 

A consci nee more divine than we, 

A gladness fed with Becrel I 

A vexing, forward-reaching sense 

( H some more ooble p 
A light aci 

Which haunts the bou] and will nut let it be. 
Still glimmering from the heights oi undegi 

) ( are, 

v 

Whither leads the path 
To ampler fates that I 
Nut down through flowery meads, 110 

To reap an aftermath 

Of youth's vainglorious weeds : 
But up the Steep, amid the wrath 



THE COMMEMORATION ODE 63 

And shock of deadly hostile creeds, 
Where the world's best hope and stay 1 1 5 

By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way, 
And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. 

Peace hath her not ignoble wreath, 

Ere yet the sharp, decisive word 
Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword 120 

Dreams in its easeful sheath ; 
But some day the live coal behind the thought, 

Whether from Baal's stone obscene, 

Or from the shrine serene 

Of God's pure altar brought, 125 

Bursts up in flame ; the war of tongue and pen 
Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught, 
And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, 
Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men : 
Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed 130 

Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, 
And cries reproachful : " Was it, then, my praise, 
And not myself was loved ? Prove now thy truth ; 
I claim of thee the promise of thy youth ; 
Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase, 135 

The victim of thy genius, not its mate ! " 
Life may be given in many ways, 
And loyalty to Truth be sealed 
As bravely in the closet as the field, 

So bountiful is Pate ; 140 

But then to stand beside her, 

When craven churls deride her, 
To front a lie in arms and not to yield, 

This shows, methinks, God's plan 

And measure of a stalwart man, 145 

Limbed like the old heroic breeds, 



64 THE COMMEMORATION ODE 

Who stands self-poised on manhood's solid earth, 
Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, 
Fed from within with all the strength he needs. 



Such was he, our Martyr-Chief, 150 

Whom late the Nation he had led, 
With ashes on her head. 
Wept with the passion of an angiy grief : 
Forgive me, if from present tilings I turn 
To speak what in my heart will beat and bum. 155 
And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. 

Nature they say, doth dote. 

And cannot make a man 

Save on some worn-out plan. 

Repeat in- us by rote : 160 

For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw. 
And. choosing sweet claj from the breast 

Of the unexhausted W. rt, 
With Btuff untainted shaped a hero new, 

Wise, steadfast in the strength ^i God, and true*, i » ► ~> 

How beautiful I 
Once more a shepherd oi mankind ind< 
Who loved hi- charge, but never bved to had: 

One whose meek flock the people joyed I 

Not lured by any eheat of birth. 170 

But by his dear-grained human worth. 
Ami brave old wisdom of sincerity ! 

VI. This stanza was not recited ; it « immedi- 

ately after the public delivery of the ode and included in it. It 
cannot be called an afterthought, for the noble lines OX] 
carry to a climax the intense feeling which animates the entire 
poem, and in Lowell's own mind was the very soul of ti 
that fell from his lips. 



THE COMMEMORATION ODE 65 

They knew that outward grace is dust ; 
They could not choose but trust 
In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill, 175 

And supple-tempered will 
That bent like perfect steel to spring again and 
thrust. 
His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind, 
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars, 
A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind ; 180 

Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, 
Fruitful and friendly for all human-kind, 
Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. 

Nothing of Europe here, 
Or, then, of Europe fronting morn-ward still, 185 

Ere any names of Serf and Peer 
Could Nature's equal scheme deface 

And thwart her genial will ; 
Here was a type of the true elder race, 189 

And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to 
face. 
I praise him not ; it were too late ; 
And some innative weakness there must be 
In him who condescends to victory 
Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait, 

Safe in himself as in a fate. 195 

So always firmly he : 
He knew to bide his time, 
And can his fame abide, 
Still patient in his simple faith sublime, 

Till the wise years decide. 200 

Great captains, with their guns and drums, 
Disturb our judgment for the hour, 
But at last silence comes ; 



66 THE COMMEMORATION ODE 

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, 
Our children shall behold his fame, 205 

The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, 
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 
New birth of our new soil, the first American. 



Long as man's hope insatiate can discern 

Or only guess some more inspiring goal 210 

Outside of Self, enduring as the pole, 

Along whose course the Hying axles burn 

Of spirits bravely-pitched, earth's manlier brood; 
Long as below we cannot rind 

The meed that stills the inexorable mind: 215 

So long this faith to some ideal ( I 

Under whatever mortal name it n 

Freedom. Law. Country, this ethereal mood 
That thanks the Pates for their severer I 

Feeling its challenged pulses Leap, 

While others skulk in Bubfe sap, 

And. set in Danger's van. has all the boon it asks, 

Shall win man'- praise and woman's I 

Shall be a wisdom that we 
All other BkOla and gifts to culture dear, 

A virtue round whose forehead we enwroatho 

Laurels that with a Living passion breathe 
When other crowns grow, while we twine them, 
sear. 

What brings as thronging these high r 
pay, 
And seal these hours the noblest of our year. 

Save that our brothers found this better wav ? 



THE COMMEMORATION ODE 67 



We sit here in the Promised Land 
That flows with Freedom's honey and milk ; 

But 't was they won it, sword in hand, 
Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk. 235 

We welcome back our bravest and our best ; — 
Ah me ! not all ! some come not with the rest, ' 
Who went forth brave and bright as any here ! 
I strive to mix some gladness with my strain, 

But the sad strings complain, 240 

And will not please the ear : 
I sweep them for a paean, but they wane 

Again and yet again 
Into a dirge, and die away in pain. 
In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, 245 

Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps, 
Dark to the triumph which they died to gain : 
Fitlier may others greet the living, 
For me the past is unforgiving ; 

I with uncovered head 250 

Salute the sacred dead, 
Who went, and who return not. — Say not so ! 
'T is not the grapes of Canaan that repay, 
But the high faith that failed not by the way ; 

246. " In the privately priuted edition of the poem the names 
of eight of the poet's kindred are given. The nearest in blood 
are his nephews, General Charles Russell Lowell, killed at 
Winchester, Lieutenant James Jackson Lowell, at Seven Pines, 
and Captain William Lowell Putnam, at Ball's Bluff. Another 
relative was the heroic Colonel Robert G. Shaw, who fell in 
the assault on Fort Wagner." — Underwood's James Russell 
Lowell. 

253 See the Book of Numbers, chapter xiii. 



68 THE COMMEMORATION ODE 

Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave ; 255 
No bar of endless night exiles the brave ; 

And to the saner mind 
We rather seem the dead that stayed behind. 
Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow ! 
For never shall their aureoled presence lack : 260 

I see them muster in a gleaming row. 
With ever-youthfid brows that nobler show ; 
We find in our dull road their shining track ; 

In every nobler mood 
We feel the orient of their spirit glow, 265 

Part of our life's unalterable good, 
Of all our saintlier aspiration : 

They come transfigured back. 
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways. 
Beautiful evermore, and with the raya 
Of morn on their whit*- Shields of Expectation] 



\\w\ is there hope to Bave 
Eventhi8 ethereal essence from the gi 
What ever 'scaped Oblivion's subtle wrong 274 
Save a few clarion names, or golden threat 
Before my musing 
The mighty one- of old Bweep by, 
Disvoiced now and insubstantial things, 
As noisy oner as we ; poor ghosi 
Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust. 
And many races, nan 

256. Compare (i ray's line in BZegy M ■ ' hyard, 

" The paths of glory lead but to the grave." 
Tennyson nsefl the same words, bat with different ami nobler 
meaning, in his Ode to tht / gton. 



THE COMMEMORATION ODE 69 

To darkness driven by that imperious gust 

Of ever-rushing Time that here doth blow : 

O visionary world, condition strange, 

Where naught abiding is but only Change, 285 

Where the deep-bolted stars themselves still shift and 
range ! 

1 Shall we to more continuance make pretence ? 

Renown builds tombs ; a life-estate is Wit ; 
And, bit by bit, 

The cunning years steal all from us but woe : 290 

Leaves are we, whose decays no harvest sow. 

But, when we vanish hence, 
Shall they lie forceless in the dark below, 
Save to make green their little length of sods, 
Or deepen pansies for a year or two, 295 

Who now to us are shining-sweet as gods ? 
Was dying all they had the skill to do ? 
That were not fruitless : but the Soul resents 
Such short-lived service, as if blind events 
Ruled without her, or earth could so endure ; 300 
She claims a more divine investiture 
Of longer tenure than Fame's airy rents ; 
Whate'er she touches doth her nature share ; 
Her inspiration haunts the ennobled air, 

Gives eyes to mountains blind, 305 

Ears to the deaf earth, voices to the wind, 
And her clear trump sings succor everywhere 
By lonely bivouacs to the wakeful mind ; 
For soul inherits all that soul could dare : 

Yea, Manhood hath a wider span 310 

And larger privilege of life than man. 
The single deed, the private sacrifice, 
So radiant now through proudly-hidden tears, 



70 THE COMMEMORATION ODE 

Is covered up ere long from mortal eyes 
With thoughtless drift of the deciduous years ; 315 
But that high privilege that makes all men peers. 
That leap of heart whereby a people rise 
Up to a noble anger's height, 
And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow 
more bright, 
That swift validity in noble veins, 320 

Of choosing danger and disdaining shame. 

Of being set on flame 
By the pure fire that flies all contact base. 
But wraps its chosen with angelic might, 
These arc imperishable gains, 
Sure as the sun. medicinal as light, 
These hold great futures in their lusty reins 
And certify to earth a new imperial ra 



Who now shall sneer? 
Who dare again to Baj we trace 330 

( )ur lines to a plebeian rao 
Roundhead and Cavalier ! 
Dumb are those Dames erewhile in battle loud: 
Dream-footed a^ the shadow of a aloud, 

They flit across the ear : 
That is best blood that hath most iron in "t. 
To edge resolve with, pouring without stint 
For what make- manhood dear. 
Tell us not of Plantageneta, 
Hapsburgs, and Gruelfs, whose thin bloods crawl 340 
Down from some victor in a border-brawl ! 
How poor their outworn coronets, 



THE COMMEMORATION ODE 71 

Matched with one leaf of that plain civic wreath 
Our brave for honor's blazon shall bequeath, 

Through whose desert a rescued Nation sets 345 
Her heel on treason, and the trumpet hears 
Shout victory, tingling Europe's sullen ears 

With vain resentments and more vain regrets ! 



Not in anger, not in pride, 

Pure from passion's mixture rude, 350 

Ever to base earth allied, 

But with far-heard gratitude, 

Still with heart and voice renewed, 
To heroes living and dear martyrs dead, 
The strain should close that consecrates our brave. 355 
Lift the heart and lift the head ! 

Lofty be its mood and grave, 

Not without a martial ring, 

Not without a prouder tread 

And a peal of exultation : 360 

Little right has he to sing 

Through whose heart in such an hour 

Beats no march of conscious power, 

Sweeps no tumult of elation ! 

'T is no Man we celebrate, 365 

By his country's victories great, 
A hero half, and half the whim of Fate, 

But the pith and marrow of a Nation 

Drawing force from all her men, 

Highest, humblest, weakest, all, 370 

For her time of need, and then 

Pulsing it again through them, 
Till the basest can no longer cower, 



72 THE COMMEMORATION ODE 

Feeling his soul spring up divinely tall. 
Touched but in passing by her mantle-hem. 375 

Come back, then, noble pride, for 't is her dower ! 
How could poet ever tower, 
If his passions, hopes, and fears. 
If his triumphs and his tears, 
Kept not measure with his people ? 380 

Boom, cannon, boom to all the winds and w;/ 
Clash out, glad bells, from every rocking steeple ! 
Banners, adance with triumph, bend your staves ! 
And from ever}- mountain-peak 
Let beacon-fire to answering beacon speak, 
Katahdin tell Monadnock, Wnitefaee he. 
And so leap on in light from sea to sea, 
Till the glad news be sent 
Across a kindling continent, 
Making earth feel more firm and air breathe bi 
M Be proud ! for she is saved, and all have helped to 
save her ! 
She that lifts np the manhood ol the poor, 
She of the open soul and open door, 
With room about her hearth for all mankind ! 
The fire is dreadful in b< r 

From her bold front the helm she doth unbind. 
Semis all her handmaid armies back bo spin, 
And bids her navies, that BO lately hurled 
Their crashing battle, hold their thunder- in. 
Swimming like bird- of calm along the anharmfoJ shore. 
No challenge -end- -he to the elder world. 

That looked askamv and hated : B light -eorn 
Play- o'er her month, as round her mighty ba 
She calls her children back, and waits the morn 

Oi nobler day, enthroned between her subject -< 



THE COMMEMORATION ODE T*\ 



Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release ! 
Thy God, in these distempered days, 
Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways, 
And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace ! 

Bow down in prayer and praise ! 410 

No poorest in thy borders but may now 
Lift to the juster skies a man's enfranchised brow, 
O Beautiful ! my Country ! ours once more ! 
Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair 
O'er such sweet brows as never other wore, 415 

And letting thy set lips, 

Freed from wrath's pale eclipse, 
The rosy edges of their smile lay bare, 
What words divine of lover or of poet 
Could tell our love and make thee know it, 420 

Among the Nations bright beyond compare ? 

What were our lives without thee ? 

What all our lives to save thee ? 

We reck not what we gave thee ; 

We will not dare to doubt thee, 425 

But ask whatever else, and we will dare ! 




74 MEMORISE POSITUM 

MEMORY POSITUM 
R. G. SHAW 

I 

Beneath the trees, 
My lifelong friends in tins dear spot. 
Sad now for eyes that see them not, 
I hear the autumnal breeze 
Wake the dry leaves to sigh for gladness gone, 5 
Whispering vague omens of oblivion. 

Bear, restless as tin 
Time's grim Ceet rustling through the withered 

grace 
Of many a spreading realm and strong-stemmed 
race, 

Kwii ;t- my own through t fa 10 

Why make we moan 

For loss that doth enrich as yet 
With upward yearnings of regret? 

Bleaker than onmossed Btone 
Our lives were l>ut for this immortal B 

Of unstilled longing and inspiring pain ! 

A> thrills of Long-hushed tent- 
Live in the viol. BO our BOuls -row line 
AVith keen vihrations from the toueh divine 

Of noble nature- gone. 

1. This poem is printed hero on account of its relation to 
the CoDvntmoratioH Odt : see note. p. 57. The BUM memories 
inspired the stanza in Mr. Hosea Biglotc's IcW-. etc. 




ROBERT GOULD SHAW 

WILLIAM LOWELL PUTNAM CHARLES RUSSELL LOWELL 

JAMES JACKSON LOWELL 



MEMORIAL POSITUM 75 

'T were indiscreet 
To vex the shy and sacred grief 
With harsh obtrusions of relief ; 

Yet, Verse, with noiseless feet, 
Go whisper : " This death hath far choicer ends 25 
Than slowly to impearl in hearts of friends ; 

These obsequies 't is meet 
Not to seclude in closets of the heart, 
But, church-like, with wide doorways, to impart 

Even to the heedless street." 30 



Brave, good, and true, 
I see him stand before me now, 
And read again on that young brow, 
W Where every hope was new, 
How sweet were life ! Yet, by the mouth firm-set, 35 
And look made up for Duty's utmost debt, 

I could divine he knew 
That death within the sulphurous hostile lines, 
In the mere wreck of nobly-pitched designs, 

Plucks heart's-ease, and not rue. 40 

Happy their end 
Who vanish down life's evening stream 
Placid as swans that drift in dream 

Bound the next river-bend ! 
Happy long life, with honor at the close, 45 

Friends' painless tears, the softened thought of foes ! 

And yet, like him, to spend 
All at a gush, keeping our first faith sure 
From mid-life's doubt and eld's contentment poor, 

What more could Fortune send ? 50 



76 MEMORISE POSITUM 

Right in the van, 
On the red rampart's slippery swell, 
With heart that beat a charge, he fell 

Foewarcl, as fits a man ; 
But the high soul burns on to light men's feet 55 
Where death for noble ends makes dying sweet : 

His life her crescent's span 
Orbs full with share in their undarkening days 
Who ever climbed the battailous steeps of praise 

Since valor's praise began. 60 



His life's expense 
Hath won him ooetemal youth 
With the immaculate prime of Truth ; 

While we, who make pretence ^ 

At living on. ami wake ami tat ami -deep, 65 

Ami life's -talc trick by repetition keep, 

Our fickle permanence 
( A pooi' leaf-shadow on a brook, whose play 
Of busy idlesse ceases with our <1. 

Is the mere cheat of 961180. 7n 

We bide our ehanee. 
Unhappy, and make term- with Fate 
A little more to let OS wait : 
He Leads for aye the advance. 
Hope'- forlorn-hopes that plant the deS] 
For nobler Earths and days of manlier mood : : 

Our wall of circumstance 
Cleared at a bound, he flashes o'er the fight, 
A saintly shape o\ tame, to cheer the right 

And stool each wayering glance. 



MR. HOSEA BIGLOW 77 

I write of one, 
While with dim eyes 1 think of three ; 
Who weeps not others fair and brave as he ? 
Ah, when the fight is won, 
Dear Land, whom triflers now make bold to scorn, 85 
(Thee ! from whose forehead Earth awaits her 
morn,) 
How nobler shall the sun 
Flame in thy sky, how braver breathe thy air, 
That thou bred'st children who for thee could dare 
And die as thine have done ! 90 



MR. HOSEA BIGLOW TO THE EDITOR OF THE 
ATLANTIC MONTHLY 

[When the war for the Union broke out, Mr. Lowell contrib- 
uted to the Atlantic Monthly a second series of Biglow Papers, 
and just before the close of the war published the poem that 
follows.] 

Dear Sir, — Your letter come to han' 

Requestin' me to please be funny ; 
But I ain't made upon a plan 

Thet knows wut 's comin', gall or honey : 
Ther 1 's times the world doos look so queer, 5 

Odd fancies come afore I call 'em ; 
An' then agin, for half a year, 

No preacher 'thout a call 's more solemn. 

You 're 'n want o' sunthin' light an' cute, 

Rattlin' an' shrewd an' kin' o' jingleish, 10 

An' wish, pervidin' it 'ould suit, 
I 'd take an' citify my English. 



78 MR. HOSE A BIGLOW 

I hen write long-tailed, ef I please, — 
But when I 'm jokin', no, I thankee ; 

Then, 'fore I know it, my idees 15 

Run helter-skelter into Yankee. 

Sence I begun to scribble rhyme, 

I tell ye wut, I hain't ben foolin' ; 
The parson's books, life, death, an' time 

Hev took some trouble with my schoolhr ; 20 
Nor th' airth don't git pot out with me, 

Thet love her "z though she wuz a woman : 
Why, th" ain't a bird upon the tree 

But half forgives my bein' human. 

An' yit I love th' unhighschooled way 

Or formers bed when 1 wuz younger; ^ 

Th.ir talk wuz meatier, an" "uuld stay, 

While book-froth seems t«> whet your hunger; 
For puttin' in a downright liek 

'Twixt Bumbng 1 r 1 'a few can meteh it. 

An* then it helves my thoughts ea slick SI 

Ea Btret-grained hickory doos a hetchet 

Bat when I Can't, I can't, thet 's all. 

Lor Natur' won't put uj» with -ullin' : 
[dees you hev t<> -hove an" haul 35 

Like a druv pig ain't wuth a mullein: 
Live thoughts ain't Bent for: thru all 

()' sense they pour an' rest ye onwards, 
Like rivers when south-kin* drifts 

Feel thet th' old airth 's a-wheelin" sunward-. 

Time wuz, the rhymes come erowdin' thick 
Ez omee-seeker- a iter "lection. 



MR. HOSE A BIGLOW 79 

An into ary place 'ould stick 

Without no bother nor objection ; 
But sence the war my thoughts hang back 45 

Ez though I wanted to enlist 'em, 
An' subs'tutes — they don't never lack, 

But then they '11 slope afore you 've mist 'em. 

Nothin' don't seem like wut it wuz ; 

I can't see wut there is to hender, 50 

An' yit my brains jes' go buzz, buzz, 

Like bumblebees agin a winder ; 
'Fore these times come, in all airth's row, 

Ther' wuz one quiet place, my head in, 
Where I could hide an' think, — but now 55 

^^s all one teeter, hopin', dreadin'. 

Where 's Peace ? I start, some clear-blown night, 

When gaunt stone walls grow numb an' number, 
An', creakin' 'cross the snow-crus' white, 

Walk the col' starlight into summer ; 60 

Up grows the moon, an' swell by swell 

Thru the pale pasturs silvers dimmer 
Than the last smile thet strives to tell 

O' love gone heavenward in its shimmer. 

I hev ben gladder o' sech things 65 

Than cocks o' spring or bees o' clover, 
They filled my heart with livin' springs, 

But now they seem to freeze 'em over ; 
Sights innercent ez babes on knee, 

Peaceful ez eyes o' pastur'd cattle, 70 

Jes' coz they be so, seem to me 

To rile me more with thoughts o' battle. 



80 MR. HOSE A BIGLOW 

In-doors an' out by spells I try ; 

Ma'am Natur' keeps her spin-wheel goin', 
But leaves my natur' stiff and dry 75 

Ez fiel's o' clover arter niowin' ; 
An' her jes' keepin' on the same. 

Calmer 'n a clock, an' never carin', 
An' flndin' nary thing to blame. 

Is wus than ef she took to swear in". 80 

Snow-flakes come whisperin' on the pane, 

The charm makes blazin* logs so pleasant. 
But I can't hark to wut they re say'n*. 

With Grant or Sherman oilers present : 
The chimbleys Bhndder in the gale, 

Thet lulls, then suddin takes to flappin' 
Like a shot hawk, but all 's ez stale ^P 

To me v/. so much Bperit-rappin'. 

Under the yaller-pines I house, 

When Bunshine makes 'em all sweet-scented, 
An' hear among their furry l><> 2 

The baskin 1 west-wind purr contented, 
While 'way overhead, ea Bweel an 1 low 

Ez distant bells thet ring for meetin', 
The wedged wil' geese their bugles blow. 95 

Further an' further South retreatin*. 

Or up the slippery knob 1 -train 

An" >tv a hundred hills like ialan's 
Lift their blue woods in broken chain 

Out o' the sea o 1 snowy silence ; 100 

The farm-smok sight on airth. 

Slow thru the winter air a-shrinkin' 



MR. HOSE A BIGLOW 81 

Seem kiiv o' sad, an' roun' the hearth 
Of empty places set me thinkin'. 

Beaver roars hoarse with meltin' snows, 105 

An' rattles di'mon's from his granite ; 
Time waz, he snatched away my prose, 

An' into psalms or satires ran it ; 
But he, nor all the rest thet once 

Started my blood to country-dances, 110 

Can't set me goin' more 'n a dunce 

Thet hain't no use for dreams an' fancies. 

Rat-tat-tat-tattle thru the street 

I hear the drummers makin' riot, 
An' I set thinkin' o' the feet 115 

^pet follered once an' now are quiet, — 
White feet ez snowdrops innercent, 

Thet never knowed the paths o' Satan, 
Whose comin' step ther' 's ears thet won't, 

No, not lifelong, leave off awaitin'. 120 

Why, hain't I held 'em on my knee ? 

Did n't I love to see 'em growin', 
Three likely lads ez wal could be, 

Hahnsome an' brave an' not tu knowin' ? 
I set an' look into the blaze 125 

Whose natur', jes' like theirn, keeps climbin', 
Ez long 'z it lives, in shinin' ways, 

An' half despise myself for rhymin'. 

Wut 's words to them whose faith an' truth 

On War's red techstone rang true metal, 130 
105 Beaver Brook, a tributary of the Charles. 



82 MR. HOSE A BIGLOW 

Who venter ed life an' love an' youth 
For the gret prize o' death in battle ? 

To him who, deadly hurt, agen 

Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, 

Tippin' with fire the bolt of men 135 

Thet rived the Rebel line asunder ? 

'T ain't right to hev the young go fust. 

All throbbin' full o' gifts an' Lfraces, 
Leavin' life's paupers dry ez dost 

To try an' make b'lieve iill their places: ho 

Nothin" but tells 

Ther' 's gaps our lives can't never fay in. 
An' thet world seems bo fur from this 

Lef for as loafers to in! 

# 

My eyes cloud up tor rain : my month 145 

AYill take to twitchin' ronn 1 the oorn< 

1 pity mothers, tu. down South, 
For all they Boi among the 

1 \\ sooner take my chance to stan 1 

At Jedgment where your mean si alavi - 

Than at God's bar h<>l* up a ban 1 

Irippin' red as yourn, Jeff Davis! 

Come. Peace! not Kke a mourner bowed 

For honor loai an 1 dear on 
Bnl proud, to meet a people proud, 

With eyes thet tell «>' triumph tas 
Come, with ban' grippin 1 on the hilt. 

An' step the! proves ye Vlctory'a daughter! 
Longin' for you. our sperits wilt 

Like shipwrecked mn - for water. 



THE FIRST SNOW-FALL 83 

Come, while our country feels the lift 

Of a gret instinct shoutin' " Forwards ! " 
An' knows thet freedom ain't a gift 

Thet tarries long in han's o' cowards ! 
Come, sech ez mothers prayed for, when 165 

They kissed their cross with lips thet quivered, 
An' bring fair wages for brave men, 

A nation saved, a race delivered ! 



THE FIRST SNOW-FALL 

[In a letter to Sydney H. Gay, dated Elmwood, December 22, 
1849, Lowell wrote : " Print that as if you loved it. Let not a 
comma be blundered. Especially I fear they will put ' gleam- 
ing ' for' gloaming ' in the first line unless you look to it. May 

you ! flw have the key which shall unlock the whole meaning 
of the poem to you ! "] 

The snow had begun in the gloaming, 

And busily all the night 
Had been heaping field and highway 

With a silence deep and white. 

Every pine and fir and hemlock 5 

Wore ermine too dear for an earl, 

And the poorest twig on the ehn-tree 
Was ridged inch-deep with pearl. 

From sheds new-roofed with Carrara 

Came Chanticleer's muffled crow, 10 

The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, 
And still fluttered down the snow. 

9. The marble of Carrara, Italy, is noted for its purity. 



84 THE FIRST SNOW-FALL 

I stood and watched by the window 

The noiseless work of the sky, 
And the sudden flurries of snow-birds, 1.5 

Like brown leaves whirling by. 

I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn 

Where a little headstone stood - y 
How the flakes were folding it gently. 

As did robins the babes in the wood. 20 

Up spoke our own little Mabel. 

Saying, •• Father, who makes it snow?" 
And I told of the good All-father 

Who cares for as here below. 

Again I looked at the snow-fall, ^fe. 

And thought <>i" the leaden skj 
That arched o'er our first great sorrow, 
When that mound was heaped bo high. 

I remembered tin- grad ual patience 

That frll from that cloud like -now, 30 

Flake b\ flake, healing and hiding 

The soar of our deep-plunged woe. 

And again to the child I win -pored, 
M The snow that husheth all. 

Darling, the merciful Father 

Alone can make it tall ! " 

Then, with eyes that Baw not. I kissed her: 
And she, kissing hark, oould not know 

That my kiss was given to her rial 
Folded elose under deepening -now. 



THE CHANGELING 85 



THE CHANGELING 

I had a little daughter, 

And she was given to me 
To lead me gently backward 

To the Heavenly Father's knee, 
That I, by the force of nature, 5 

Might in some dim wise divine 
The depth of his infinite patience 

To this wayward soul of mine. 

I know not how others saw her, 

But to me she was wholly fair, 10 

And the light of the heaven she came from 

Still lingered and gleamed in her hair ; 
For it was as wavy and golden, 

And as many changes took, 
As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples 15 

On the yellow bed of a brook. 

To what can I liken her smiling 

Upon me, her kneeling lover, 
How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids, 

And dimpled her wholly over, 20 

Till her outstretched hands smiled also, 

And I almost seemed to see 
The very heart of her mother 

Sending sun through her veins to me ! 

She had been with us scarce a twelve-month, 25 
And it hardly seemed a day, 



86 THE CHANGELING 

When a troop of wandering angels 

Stole my little daughter away : 
Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari 

But loosed the hampering strings. 30 

And when they had opened her eage-door. 

My little bird used her wings. 

But they left in her stead a changeling. 

A little angel child. 
That seems like her bud in full blossom. 35 

And smiles as she never smiled: 
When I wake in tin- morning, I see it 

Where she always used to lie. 
And I feel as wreak as a violet 

Alone neath tin- awful sky. 40 

Ajb w.-ak. yet a^ trustful also ; 

For the whole year long I 
All the wonders of faithful Nature 

Still worked for the love of me j 

Winds wander, and dews drip earthward, 45 

Rain mils, sons rise and set, 
Earth whirls, and all bat t»> prosper 

A poor little violet. 

This child i> not mine B8 the first WAS, 

1 cannot sing it to rest, BO 

I cannot lift it op fatherly 

And bliss it upon niv breast : 
Yet it lies in my little one's cradle 

And >it» in inv little one's chair. 
And the light of the heaven she's gOM to 

Transfigures its golden hair. 



THE FOOT-PATH 87 



THE FOOT-PATH 

It mounts athwart the windy hill 

Through sallow slopes of upland bare, 

And Fancy climbs with foot-fall still 
Its narrowing curves that end in air. 

By day, a warmer-hearted blue 5 

Stoops softly to that topmost swell ; 

Its thread-like windings seem a clue 
To gracious climes where all is well. 

By night, far yonder, I surmise 

An ampler world than clips my ken, 10 

Where the great stars of happier skies 

Commingle nobler fates of men. 

I look and long, then haste me home, 

Still master of my secret rare ; 
Once tried, the path would end in Rome, 15 

But now it leads me everywhere. 

Forever to the new it guides, 

From former good, old overmuch ; 
What Nature for her poets hides, 

'T is wiser to divine than clutch. 20 

The bird I list hath never come 

Within the scope of mortal ear ; 
My prying step would make him dumb, 

And the fair tree, his shelter, sear. 



ALADDIN 

Behind the hill, behind the sky, 25 

Behind my inmost thought, he sings : 

No feet avail ; to hear it nigh, 

The song itself must lend the wings. 

Sing on, sweet bird, close hid. and raise 

Those angel stairways in my brain. 30 

That climb from these low-vaulted days 
To spacious sunshines far from pain. 

Sing when thou wilt, enchantment fleet, 

I leave thy covert haunt nntrod, 
And envy Science not her feat 35 

To make a twice-told tale of God. 

ALADDIN 
Wiikn I was a beggarly boy, 

And lived in a cellar damp. 

I had not a friend nor a toy. 
Bn1 I had Aladdin'- lamp; 

When I OOnld not sleep tor the cold, 5 

I had fire enough in my brain. 
And huilded. with roofs of -old. 

My heautit'nl oartkfl in Spain! 

Since then I have toiled day and night, 

1 have money and power good Store, in 

Bat I 'd give all my lampfl oi silver bright 

For the one that i- mine no more : 
Take. Fortune, whatever yon eh 

Von gave, and ma\ snatch again : 
1 have nothing 'twould pain me to lose. 15 

For 1 own no more easUefl in Spain I 



AIDS TO THE STUDY OF THE VISION OF 
SIR LAUNFAL 

BY H. A. DAVIDSON 



THE STUDY OF THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL 

Lowell's interpretation of the poet's mission is given in 
his own words in a letter to his friend, C. F. Briggs, dated 
February 18, 1846. He writes, ..." my calling is clear 
to me. I am never lifted up to any peak of vision — and 
moments of almost fearful inward illumination I have some- 
times — but that when I look down in hope to see some valley 
of the Beautiful Mountains, I behold nothing but blackened 
ruins ; and the moans of the downtrodden the world over — 
but chiefly here in our own land — come up to my ear, in- 
stead of the happy songs of the husbandmen reaping and 
binding the sheaves of light ; yet these, too, I hear not sel- 
dom. Then I feel how great is the office of poet, could I but 
even dare to hope to fill it. Then it seems as if my heart 
would break in pouring out one glorious song that should 
be the gospel of Reform, full of consolation and strength to 
the oppressed, yet falling gently and restoringly as dew on 
the withered youth-flowers of the oppressor. That way my 
madness lies, if any." 

The same conception of the poet's high mission as a leader 
of reform finds expression in many of Lowell's early poems, 
especially those in a small volume entitled A Year's Life, ■*— 

" Never had poets such high call before, 
Never can poets hope for higher one, 



For he who settles Freedom's principles 

Writes the death-warrant of all tyranny ; 

Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart." 

From L' 'Envoi. 



90 THE STUDY OF 

But the true inspiration of The Vision of Sir Launfal 
must be sought in Lowell's relation to the anti-slavery 
cause in its birth hour. With the enthusiasm of early love 
and superabundant vitality, the young poet entered the lists 
as the champion of the downtrodden and the oppressed. 
The movement led by Garrison and Phillips and a score of 
devoted men was to him none other than a holy crusade. 
He bewailed the necessity which compelled him to receive 
money for the contributions of his pen ; in his own thought, 
his words were the expression of burning conviction, poured 
forth in behalf of fellow beings — even the lowliest and 
most oppressed. 

It is significant that twice in Lowell's life the composition 
of great poems at fever heat, in an incredibly Bhort space of 
time, followed many months of polemical writing in prose 
on the same subject. It would >eem M if the man had 
sweated over hi- idea- and wrought them into p hrao ei apt 
to Uipieso bit meaning until, in hi- own words, they passed 
from bis memory into the blood, when suddenly the poet's 
brain took lire, and traii-muted into song the deep convic- 
tion and the heartfelt emotion of the philanthropist In 
the year preceding the composition of .. 
tin/i (),!,•. in January, duly, and October, the A 
iasM li' '•'<> ic contained political article! from ms pen. deal- 
ing with tin- ieenee involved in Mr. Lincoln'! candidacy for 

reelection. Of this and other poem! belonging in the - 

groop he writes, M My blood was ap and you would hardly 
believe me if 1 were to tell how few boon 

tween conception and completion, even i:. MM M 

.1/ is** and Slidell. So I have a kind of faith that the 
'Ode' i- rigbi because it was i • 1 '.• knew how. 

... I had put the ethical ami political 'li in 

prose that I was weary of it. The motta i f? 1 

had impatiently argued them again and again — hut for an 
ode they must be in the. blood, not in the memory." 

Once before, in Lowell's life, a period of hot partisanship 
and polemical argument had been followed by the conception 



THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL 91 

and swift composition of a beautiful poem, The Vision of 
Sir Launfal, in which the poet's zeal for the anti-slavery 
cause found expression. From the beginning, Lowell had 
conceived of the attempt to root slavery out of the land of 
the free as a holy crusade ; and when, in 1846, he became 
a regular contributor to The Standard, the organ of the 
American Anti-Slavery Society, he entered on his task as 
on a holy warfare. He insisted on the privilege of sending 
contributions either in prose or in verse, as the humor seized 
him or the muse inspired. During the time that Lowell 
wrote for this periodical — about four years — his pen was 
the servant of an almost chivalrous loyalty and devotion to 
the cause he and his wife had espoused. In different form, 
prose and poetry alike breathed the same urgent message ; 
when the poet's imagination took fire and he sought a theme 
for a longer poem than he had yet written, the form of a par- 
able came to his mind, in which the leper at the gate, grue- 
some, repulsive, and rejected, was no other than the black 
slave. 

. Two groups of poems hold an intimate relation to The 
Vision of Sir Launfal and serve to interpret the hidden 
meaning of the legend. In one of these groups are other 
poems, written in this period of Lowell's life in the mood 
that inspired The Vision of Sir Launfal. The most signifi- 
cant of these will be found in Group A, pages 16-33. The 
story of Sir Launfal's adventure is, in truth, the parable 
of a holy crusade ; the knight going forth in search of the 
Grail reaches his goal, not in the land where Christ was 
buried, but at the very door of his own castle in the North 
Countree, when he shared his crust with the loathsome, grue- 
some thing he saw at his side, and the revealing light fell 
clear around him. The Search (February, 1847) is almost a 
parallel, a commentary, for The Vision of Sir Launfal, the 
futile search for Christ ending in a " hovel rude " where 

"The King I sought for meekly stood ; 
A naked, hungry child 
Clung round his gracious knee, 



92 THE STUDY OF 

And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled, 
To bless the smile that set him free." 

This is the leper by Sir Launfal's gate in the North 
Countree. 

In A Parable (May. 1848), said Christ our Lord, — 

" Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then. 
On the bodies and souls of living - men ? 
And think ye that building- shall endure. 
Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor '? " 



. . . '" Lo, here.'* said he. 
The images ye have made of me.'' 

And Christ set in the midst of those who named his name, 
the poet says, creatures so low and degraded that the hem of 
the garment was drawn back lest it should be defiled. 

In Bibliolatret (May. 1849), Lowell cried out in pas- 
sionate impatience with men who worship " light ancestral" 
and at the Bame time turn deaf ears to the moaning of the 
oppressed : — 

•" What art thou, own hroth.-r of the elod, 1 

Bowing thyself in dual before ■ Book, 

And thinking the gieal God ■ tliin. 

r;,„l u not dumb that II.- should speak no more ; 
If thou hast wanderings in the wil I 

And lind">t not S 

There towers the mountain of the Voice no less. 

Which wh — seeks shall find.* 1 ... 

Here, also, we find the mountain that strives with the faint- 
hearted, the Sinai that we daily climb, not heeding, in 

..." moral li 
l'\ prophet eats from Hoi and Sinai caught." . . . 

A sentence in ■ letter written by Lowell in September, 
1S4S, suggests the typical significance, in his mind, of the 

mountain in the wihleriu sja, Sinai ! — " We may reach our 
Promised Land : hut it is far behind us in the Wilderness. 
in the early time of Btniggle, thai we have left our Sinais 
and our personal talk with God in the bush.'" 
1 The order of the lines in the poem has not been preserved here. 



THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL 93 

In Freedom (June, 1848), " the great winds utter pro- 
phecies,'' — 

" Are we, then, wholly fallen ? Can it be 
That thou, North wind, that from thy mountains bringest, 
Their spirit to our plains, and thou, blue sea, 
Who on our rocks tby wreaths of freedom flingest, 
As on an altar, — can it be that ye 
Have wasted inspiration on dead ears, 
Dulled with the too familiar clank of chains ? " 

"Fallen and traitor lives " characterize those descendants 
of the men that came in the "hero-freighted Mayflower" 
who shrink back, fleeing God's express design. The beauti- 
ful figure of Freedom fleeing morn-ward with light footsteps, 
gone before the day has risen, is lost in the strenuous urgency 
of the moralist. 

The Present Crisis (December, 1845), that noblest of 
all Lowell's poems, is the epitome of the very spirit of our 
Pilgrim forefathers, at the same time great, and narrow, 
and prophetic of the future. In words thrilling with pas- 
sionate conviction and enkindled with imagination, the 
poet lifts the strife of his own time into the plain of world 
history, and it becomes infinitely great because it marks one 
step in the advance of the human race. 

" Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, 
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side ; 
Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or 
blight, 

And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned 
One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath 

burned 
Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven up- 
turned." 

Careful study of Lowell's prose in the files of The Stand- 
ard, in connection with poems written approximately at 
the same time, would reveal a close parallel, also, between the 
expression of conviction in the form of argument and the em- 
bodiment in verse of enthusiasm and emotion arising from 



94 THE STUDY OF 

conviction ; but this is a subject inviting to the critical reader 
rather than a task for the school room. 

But were the expression of conviction, the hidden mean- 
ing of the parable, the only purpose dear to the poet's heart 
in The Vision of Sir Launfal. it would not be the noble 
poem it is. Deep conviction may be the soul of the beauti- 
ful work of art in any medium, be it language, or marble, 
or color, or sound, but it cannot of itself become the essential 
characteristic of the art form chosen as the means of expres- 
sion. There must be some imaginative organization of 
thought to make it a fit subject for a work of ait. and the 
form chosen must be adorned and enriched, as the artist i- 
able, by every means Baited to his need which tradition and 
usage have sanctioned as forms of expression for artistic 
truth or beauty. The Vision of Sir Launfal. serving as 
an expression of Lowell's belief in the obligation of human 
being to fellow human being, is nevertheless, intimately, the 
overflowing of a poet'fl heart full <>f the love of nature and 
the mood of youth. ( hi this >;,■ 

may he studied beet in connection with another group of 
poems belonging also to the same period of early manhood 

and happiness is the prose and the longer poem. Ctii 
eiallv to note the poet's fon<lnc-> for the high-tide of the year 

in dune that a nuniher of these pOOfM Group 1>. 

88) are included in this volume and referred to here. The 

material of his obserration is essentially the same in the 
Berera] poems, and the reader feels the note of genuine < 

rience and emotion in the BpontaneouS, untroubled repetition 
from various points of View. 

'"'. January, 1849) is the brook 

of the second prelude i: 5 /"/. and in 

the poem Lowell - which is the key- 

note of his improvisation in A Da ij in Jam', that u Beauty 

underlies forerermorc each form of use." Ai States is full 

of haunting echoes oi descriptions of nature in older 
which had enriched the poet's brain : the ••hermit thrush." 
the u buccaneering bee." the ••nunnery of the lily," and. 



THE VISION OF SIR LA UN FA L % 

more than all, the subtler reference to the thought per- 
vading Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, in 

" To-day I will be a boy again," 

and to his own first prelude in The Vision of Sir Launfal, in 

" What gospels lost the woods retrieve." 

The first paragraphs of Under the Willows read like another 
version of " And what is so rare as a day in June." 

" June is the pearl of our New England year." 

" June ! Dear June ! Now God be praised for June." 

The description of the coming of spring in Sunthin' in 
the Pastoral Line, of the waking up of " Northun natur', 
slow and apt to doubt," is a close parallel in selection, even 
in phrase, to the descriptions of the same time of year in 
Under the Willoivs and in The Vision of Sir Launfal. 
" The robin is plastering his house hard by," in one poem ; 
in the other, when " the gray hossches'nuts leetle hands 
unfold, the robin-redbreast, mindful of his ' almanick,' goes 
to plast'rin his adobe house." The identity in mood and in 
detail of observation is no less marked that in one, the hang- 
bird flashes ; in another the bobolink, the soul of the sweet sea- 
son, swings. In each poem Lowell varies his choice of phrase 
or illustration to suit the point of view chosen and the pur- 
pose in mind, but the rhythmic pulse attuning the heart of 
the poet to " the natural way of living " is always the same. 

These poems illustrate, also, Lowell's fondness for his own 
phrases and conceits, and show the frequency with which 
he repeats himself ; perchance, as well, the reason why he 
so often found the poetic muse " Invita Minerva." In 
Beaver Brook " Warm noon brims full the valley's cup ; " 
in An Indian-Summer Reverie "Hebe Autumn fills the 
bowl between me and those distant hills ; " and in Al 
Fresco u The rich, milk-tingeing buttercup Its tiny pol- 
ished urn holds up, Filled with ripe summer to the edge." 

In Under the Willows, the poet says, " What a day to 
sun me and do nothing ; " in The Vision of Sir Launfal, 
" We sit in the warm shade and feel how the sap creeps up ; " 



96 THE STUDY OF 

and Hosea Biglow in the spring " alius feels the sap start in 
his veins." 

The poet's first love is always given to the bobolink. 
Hosea Biglow writes, 

..." June's bridesman, poet o' the year, 
Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here ; 
Half-hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings. 
Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin' wings." 

In the coming of spring among the willows, the swallow and 
the bluebird are no more than forerunners for the true poet 
of song. 

" But now, oh rapture ! sunshine winged and voiced. 

Gladness of woods, skies, waters, all in one. 
The bobolink has conic, and. like ti 
of the Bweel si soon roes] in a bird, 
GKneg we know not what." . . . 

There is no space here for tracing further Lowell's habit 
of repeating forma of expression in different poema for 
similar ideas, and of using over conceits adapted now to one 
poetic or imaginative point of vit-w. now to another. The 
illustrations that have been given are no more than sugges- 
tions f<>r wider leading and comparison such as any pupil 

fond of poetry may carry out. 

Lowell calls all his war poema improvisations Ti- 
to be his own characterization of the moment of creation 
which combined in imaginative unity material Long familiar 
to his thooght in other form. In Tht I. - 

f<iL he chose to make improvisation personified in the 
musing organist building "a bridge from Dreamland for 
his lay '* the mould of form for the poem. Tim- the main 
theme i- expressed in a narrative held within another nar- 
rative form BO Blight that it slip- a\\a\ From the reader 

completely as he goes on. When the opening 

Ond appears the word •■Prelude" recalls him. 1> 

scarcely justified. In Tkt Aneimti M arine r, Coleridge has 

employed the Bams literary device, but with infinite!] I 

skill. Now and again, the wedding guest, an enforced lis- 



THE VISION OF SIR LA UNFA L 97 

tener, is brought to the reader's attention, and so perfect is 
this narrative form, which serves as setting for the tale the 
mariner tells, that the critic may note each typical step of 
progress from beginning to moment of climax and conclu- 
sion, clearly marked but distinct from the narrative art of 
the tale itself, which has also its own complete, well-arranged 
sequence and organization as plot. 

In The Vision of Sir Launfal, the figure of improvisation 
is shown first in the gradual approach of the poet to the 
subject of his narrative. True, he begin^with a generalized 
statement of his theme, — " We Sinais climb and know it not," 
but this is introduced in the form of a protest. It is not 
true, as Wordsworth intimates, that heaven recedes from the 
growing boy as he leaves infancy far behind. Few readers 
perceive — striving to catch the somewhat obscure meaning — 
the significance of these words as the announcement, remote 
and far away, of the real theme of the poem. Then the 
poet passes on to specify the influences in all nature, animate 
and inanimate, which strive with the heart of man that he 
may be led from the wilderness to the mountain heights 
where the soul talks face to face, as Moses of old, with God. 
It is but a step from description of these divine influences, 
manifest in the beauty and teeming life of June, to their 
effect on the hearts of men, — which at last brings the im- 
provisator to the goal he had in mind from the first, the 
beginning of his narrative. Then the generalization is 
dropped in a moment, and henceforth an illustration, in the 
single instance, of the great truth he has tried to phrase, is 
substituted. We follow in concrete example the story of 
how nature and his own heart and many varied experiences 
compelled one man along the upward way, until, after a 
weary interval, the light shone around him and he lifted his 
downward gaze to discover that, unwittingly, he had climbed 
his Sinai and found the Lord. 

Lowell marks the thematic improvisation threading his 
poem by prolonging the influence of springtime and June 
into the dream. The June day, introduced first as a mani- 



98 THE STUDY OF 

festation of the divinity that dwells in all nature and finds 
expression in beauty and life, becomes then the influence that 
moved the knight to the keeping of his vow. and lingered in 
his memory as he lay on the rushes in his own courtyard. 
When he fell asleep, the little birds of spring sang on in his 
dream, and it was. in his vision, as in reality, the one perfect 
day of all the year. Thus has the poet, advancing, retreat- 
ing, illustrating, built a bridge, not from, but into, Dream- 
land, for his lay. The picture of summer in siege around 
the dark castle, representative of the man's heart before the 
call to remember his vow came to him. repeats in variation, 
mingling with the thread of the narrative, the description of 
the June day. and suggests the Btoitvs insistently, so that it 
remains in the mind, as in mask the tlieme holds th 
and is the compelling or dominant no! 

The Prelude to Part Second ol • Laun- 

fal seems to be an attempt bo return to tlu- point of \ ; 
the improvisator and to create an artistic parallel to the 
first prelude. Beautiful at arc tlu- lines descriptive of the 

descent <>f winter from the mountain and the housing of 

the little brook in bis palace of ice, they nevertheless fail 
of the artistic purpose which the poet designed them so 
t nl til in his plan. The reasons for this failure most I 

dicated with the utmost brevity. The attempt to lead the 

imagination outside of the dream, to the point of view of the 

improvisator, is unsuccessful, became the moment the r 

pictures Sir Launfal sitting at hifl own gate, cold and shel- 
terless, the parts of the SOOnC are i . and 
the preceding description of winter and Btorm 

more than the setting of tin- picture, subordinate to the 
figure of the old man. In the Prelude to Pan First this 
reversal of parts when the element of human interest enters 
does not occur, for two r, Is up 

to the narrative ami serves ai a means of introduction, and. 
secondly, the motive which is the beginning of the slight plot. 
the stirring of purpose in the heart of the knight, is sup] 
bv this means. In Part Second the narrative is under 



THE VISION OF SIR LA UN FA L 90 

the imagination of the reader is fully committed to it, and 
there has been no reminder that the action of the story 
has reality only in the visions of the sleeping knight. The 
description, further, supplies no motive for the incidents 
that follow. The attempt to build out of it a contrast in the 
manner of the earlier figure is not convincing for lack of 
intimate correspondence between the figure and the mean- 
ing. The winter palace in no way typifies or motives the 
spiritual experience of the returning knight ; the contrast 
between the frost and cold without the castle and the cheer- 
ing glow of warmth from within seems superficial and unreal, 
since the life and light of a new spiritual purpose are in 
the heart of the man on the outside and must enter with him 
when at last the siege of summer is over. 

For similar reasons, the awakening of Sir Launfal at the 
end fails to quicken the imagination. The narrator has 
done his work too well. Readers have followed the pro- 
gress of the tale with such belief in the reality of the pas- 
sage of time that the mind refuses to turn back or to 
exchange the thin figure of the old man for the youthful 
knight who rode forth in the morning. The effort is made 
difficult by a belief rooted in the minds of us all that such 
charity and humility as Sir Launfal showed when for the 
second time he met the leper, arise in proud hearts only 
after long and bitter experience. The very wording- of the 
conclusion, " The Summer's long siege at last is o'er," lends 
itself to the persuasion of the mind that the experience of 
Sir Launfal was a real one, and the result, namely that 
mingling of new-born purpose and sympathy which ripens 
only in the flight of years, adds conviction. 

In passing, we should note that one element of an ideally 
arranged narrative is entirely lacking in the story of the 
poem. Lowell gives his tale a definite beginning and mo- 
tives sufficiently the going forth of the knight, but he does 
not indicate, even by remote suggestion, the experiences that 
changed his spirit and sent him back the humble servant of 
the lowliest human need. The reminiscent memory of the 

L.ofC. 



100 LOWELL'S LIFE AND WORKS 

old man and the contrast between his earlier and later self 
go far to supply the omission, and doubtless the difficulty 
of rounding the narrative without lessening the force of the 
truth the poet would convey was too great. Th> 
of Sir Launfal is so full of beauty in all its parts, and so 
derived from the very sun and wind and bloom of our own 
land, so instinct with the history and spirit of a young 
nation, that we all must love it and cherish it in the 
memory, not in the spirit of criticism, but as a choice in- 
heritance. 



A FEW REFERENCES FOB THE STUDY OF 
LOWELL'S LIFE AND WORKS 

James Russell Lowell, a Biography by H. E. Seodder. In 
volume i. chapters i-iv | in the 

study of The Vision <»t" Sir Launfal. In chapter iv are 
many quotations which interprel the meaning <>t phrasal 
in tin- poem. 

Letters of James Russell Lowell, edited by ('. K.Norton. 

James Russell Lowell, bj F. II. Underwood. 

James Rassell Lowell, bj V V- Bale, Jr., Beacon Biogra- 
phies of Eminent Americans. 

American Prose, bj I > R ( Sai 

James Rassel] Lowell, bj G. W. Curtis. 

A Literary History of America, by Barrett Weadefl. 

The Complete Poetical Works of Jam.- B 
Cambridge Edition. 

Cambridge Thirtj Y( in Ag • . bj J. R LoweH 

In Riverside Edition oi roi i ; 

In Fireside Trai 

In My Garden Acquaintance, end other est 

Cheerful Yesterdays, by T. W. II gg 

Contemporaries, by 1. W. Bigginson. 

Old Cambridge, by T. W, Bigginson, in National Studies 
in American Lett 



INDEBTEDNESS TO OTHER WRITERS 101 

The New England Poets, by W. C. Lawton. 

Poets of America, chapter iv, by E. C. Stedman. 

A Literary History of America, by Barrett Wendell. 

Poets' Homes, by R. H. Stoddard. 

A Reader's History of American Literature, by T. W. 

Higginson and H. W. Boynton. 
James Russell Lowell, in American Men of Letters Series, 

by Ferris Greenslet (in preparation). 



THE INDEBTEDNESS OF THE AUTHOR OF THE 
VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL TO OTHER WRITERS. 

The following note accompanied the first publication of 
The Vision of Sir Launfal in 1848, and was retained by 
Lowell in all subsequent editions : — 

" According to the mythology of the Romancers, the San 
Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus Christ 
partook of the last supper with his disciples. It was brought 
into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, 
an object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years in the 
keeping of his lineal descendants. It was incumbent upon 
those who had charge of it to be chaste in thought, word, 
and deed; but, one of the keepers having broken this condi- 
tion, the Holy Grail disappeared. From that time it was a 
favorite enterprise of the Knights of Arthur's court to go in 
search of it. Sir Galahad was at last successful in finding 
it, as may be read in the seventeenth book of the Romance 
of King Arthur. Tennyson has made Sir Galahad the sub- 
ject of one of the most exquisite of his poems. 

" The plot (if I may give that name to anything so slight) 
of the following poem is my own, and, to serve its purposes, 
I have enlarged the circle of competition in search of the 
miraculous cup in such a manner as to include not only 
other persons than the heroes of the Round Table, but also 
a period of time subsequent to the date of King Arthur's 
reign." 



102 INDEBTEDNESS TO OTHER WRITERS 

For the Legend. Lowell's indebtedness to old tales of 
quests for the Holy Grail was general and indefinite. He 
drew from mediaeval literature, with which he was intimately 
acquainted, a typical outline for the narrative of his own in- 
vention, and the traditions that have made the search for 
the Grail a symbol of consecration to some noble end enabled 
him to embody a hidden ethical purpose in his tale. The 
name of his knight appears in one form and another in the 
romances of the Middle Ages. This form of it is most 
commonly associated with the metrical romance entitled 
Launfal, by Sir Thomas Cliestre. published in the reign of 
Henry VI. and now to be found in volume i of Ritson's 
Ancient English Metrical Romances* The tale is a free 
and enlarged version of some French romance, and it relates 
amorous adventures of the knight Sir Launfal. or Lancelot, in 
another spelling, in which King Arthur and Queen Guinevere 
appear. From it Lowell borrowed no more than the name. 

For poetic figures and conceits The poet's indebted- 
ness to Wordsworth and to Cowper u Ear greater. Bash 

of thesfl poetfl touched hifl imagination, and he re-minted in 

poetic (error the figures and faneies of their poems, but no 

idea or vision came from him unchanged. The indebted- 
ness is in that Mil. tie form to be traced only through the 

creative imagination. His brain reproduced in form of 

vision idyllic pictures corresponding to the words be read. 
The phrases slipped away, hut the creations sailed ap by 

them remained a possession of bil mind, and stimulated 
activity of the >ame kind. "With true poetic instinct, lie 
transmuted each mney into the leenes and the detail of 
nature familiar by observation. It one roadl the earlier 
poems ol these aothOTS and. immediately alter. Lowell's 
preludes, there COmSS to the critical - - . Btl Mg impres- 
sion of greater condensation, closer organisation of material, 
and lighter, freer bundling of phrase and fancy in the work 
of the American poet Thus he made good his own 1 
11 "V is hifl at last who has said it best." 



TOPICS FOR STUDY 103 

The source of the inspiration of the Prelude to Part First, 
both in rich detail and in deeper meaning, cannot be mis- 
taken. Suggestions for comparison of this prelude with 
Wordsworth's Ode will be found elsewhere. In Cowper's 
The Task, Book V, " The Winter Morning Walk/' lines 
97-176, are descriptions that suggest the very figures and 
fancies of the Prelude to Part Second. The quotation of 
a few lines will illustrate, and also suggest comparison at 
greater length : — 

. . . " On the flood, 
Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight 
Lies undissolved ; while silently beneath, 
And unperceived, the current steals away. 

And see where it has hung- the embroidered banks 

With forms so various, that no powers of art, 

The pencil or the pen, may trace the scene ; 

Here glittering" turrets rise, uprearing high 

(Fantastic misarrangement ! ) on the roof 

Large growth of what may seem the sparkling trees 

And shrubs of fairy land. The crystal drops 

That trickle down the branches, fast congealed, 

Shoot into pillars of pellucid length, 

And prop the pile they but adorned before." 

Here, perhaps, is the suggestion of Lowell's steel-stemmed 

trees. 



TOPICS FOR STUDY 



PRELUDE TO PART FIRST 

1. In what is the key to the artistic presentation of the Prelude ? 

2. What is the plan of the Prelude ? 

3. Builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay is a figure 
of speech in which the poet wishes each one of us to recog- 
nize a parallel between something that takes place in the 
mind of the organist seated at his instrument and the real act 
of the figure. Find as many parts of the parallel as you can. 
Do you notice any respect in which the parallel is not a good 
one ? 



104 TOPICS FOR STUDY 

4. Nearer draws his theme. "What did the poet mean by 
his theme, — the story, or the purpose in the story, or 
something else ? What is the meaning of nearer draws, 
here ? 

5. What is the thought in the mind of the poet which is illus- 
trated by the figure faint auroral flushes ? 

Note. — In answer, describe faint auroral flushes, or flashes, 
as seen in the sky; then describe the process in the mind indi- 
cated by the words theme draws nearer. Finally, point out any 
resemblances between the two which make the figure a fit one 
for the poet's use. 

6. What did Wordsworth mean when he said that heaven is 
especially about the soul of the young child ? 

In lines 11 and 12, Lowell means that older persons, year by 
year, come nearer to heaven in another way; if you would 
understand these lines and their relation to the story that 
follows, answer the following questions carefully, in order : 
a. Where is Mount Sinai, geographically? 
I,. How long ago did the incident in the history of the Jews 
to which Lowell refers take pit 

c. For what did the lender of the tribes go up into the moun- 
tain ? Why did 1 

"S',.11 $e< Lowell's figurative use of the moan- 

tain in other ] 

d. Why was this incident important in the life of tie 
nation ? 

,. Son man] n asona can you find for deeeribang the process 
by which anv one becomes daily better ami more noble as 
climbing Sinai ? 

f. What did Lowell mean when he said we climb our Sinais 
with souls that cringe and plot ? 

7. In the third paragraph, Lowell d ■ way 

five influences which seem to plead w:: 

them to live more nearly in RCOOrd with his highest ideals. 

Name and describe in plain English words these in: 

Are they different influences, or different forms of the same 

influence ? 

S. Explain especially the meaning in : 

O. Our fallen and traitor lives. 
Note. — For one explanation, see Lowell's poem Frfdotn. 
b. prophecies, uttered by great winds ? 



TOPICS FOR STUDY 105 

9. Why did the poet call men faint-hearted ? What did he 
mean by the striving of the mountain with the faint heart ? 

10. Can you show whether Druid is a fit adjective for woods ? 
For what special reason did Lowell choose it here ? For 
the use of this word in other poetry, see p. 2. 

11. What is the dictionary meaning of the Latin word bene- 
dicite ? What part of the church service does it suggest ? 

12. If this figure, in lines 17, 18, is borrowed from the church 
service, can you explain the four parts, the waiting wood, 
the outstretched arms, the benedicite, the worshippers ? 

13. Can you explain the parallel between the figure and the 
meaning in lines 19, 20, in the same way ? 

14. Earth gets its price for what earth gives us is a 
general statement which Lowell illustrates by particulars. 
Name in order the illustrations he chooses and for each 
ask: 

a. What the words mean literally. 

b. Whether the statement is true in life as you know it ; 
give illustrations of your own, if you can. 

Note. — Earth is a figure by which one thing is used for an- 
other entirely different because it suggests the idea, or has come 
by common consent to stand for it. The personification of Earth 
is an aid in conveying this transferred meaning, and this figure 
is carried out in the conceit of bargain and price paid. Other 
expressions, the Devil's dross, a cap and bells, etc., must be 
understood in the same figurative way. 

15. Lines 29-32 are arranged in contrast with lines 21-28, at 
every point. In these lines, 

o. Underline every phrase which seems to you hard to 
understand; as, ounce of dross, Devil's booth, etc. 

b. Think what meaning each phrase has in your own mind, 
and write an explanation of it with illustration, as you would 
for a friend who could see no meaning in the poetic language 
used. 

c. Find as many points of contrast between lines 29-32 and 
lines 21-28 as you can. 

1G. What connection have these lines with the beginning of 

Prelude to Part First, lines 1-12 ? 
17. A Day in June. How is this beautiful description of a 

day in June prepared for and introduced in the preceding 

stanza ? 



106 TOPICS FOR STUDY 

18. Why was Lowell unwilling to pass at once from bis prelude 
to his narrative ? 

19. Show the plan or organization of this description by lines, 
and also bow the poet leads the reader easily from one 
division to the next. 

Note. — Lowell leads readers to the acceptance of the point 
of view he desires in this prelude by many steps of transition. 
In a large way, the poetic paragraphs divide in meaning into three 
parts. In the first, the poet narrates with genuine feeling how 
with the turn of the year and the strengthening warmth of the 
sun, life, like a high tide, floods the old channels, stirring first in 
the clod, then climbing and spreading until the wide view palpi- 
tates and thrills. Then, by the easiest transition, he tells how 
the new life of springtime affects all the happv creatures of 
the world out of doors. Then, again, bj the figure of the tide 
flooding back into every bare inlet, and creek, and bay, he 
leads our thought to the inflnenee of the season on the emotions 

and feelings of the human heart. He dwells in detail upon the 

multitudinous ways in which human beings respond to the quick- 
ening of life and activity in nature. The renewal of health and 
hope begets an impulse to achieve, and i pen to in- 

spirations that will lead to renewed purpose and effort. Thus, 

at length, we aeeept the suggestion of the pott, that from the 
divine influence in nature, the striving of the mountain, the bene- 
dieite of the Druid-wood, the tender beauty ofjuue, eanie the im- 
pulse to the heart of Sir Launfal to n member the keeping of his 

vow. Poetic diction is often obscure and indire 

expressing thought, and the questions below are intend) 
Students in the interpretation of the hidden meaning of the poet. 

20. The high tide of the year Let . : st 

from his own experience and memory the earliest - 

returning spring at the end of winter, and the cha:._ 
follow until the time of full bloom. 

21. What two things did Lowell personify in the §J 
graph of this description? How did he create a : 
relation for these personifications ? I:i what is it shown ? 

22. Add other suitable and beautiful illustrations of the poet's 
thought from your own observation. Lowell chose the illus- 
trations and figures for this poem from the immediate sur- 
roundings of his own home at Elinwood, for a description 
of which sec pages v, vi. 



TOPICS FOR STUDY 107 

23. Compare this description with Lowell's description of spring 
in other poems in, — 

a. The things observed and enjoyed most. 

b. In the order in which details are introduced. 

c. In the observer's point of view. 

Note. — This topic (No. 23) may be omitted if the poems re- 
ferred to in the discussion, p. 95, are not found in the library. 

24. How do living creatures out of doors respond to the influ- 
ence of a June day ? 

25. In Lowell's thought, what is the influence to which every 
living thing in nature responds ? Is it in the beauty of the 
day, or in something else ? 

26. What passage in the description of June do you like best ? 
Why ? What passage do you think most beautiful ? 
Why? 

27. What is the keynote, or artistic centre, of this description 
of June ? 

28. Show from lines 80-93 what influence the high tide of the 
year exerts on the human heart. 

29. a. The last stanza of the prelude is tied to the first in a 
certain way; show how. 

b. In another way, to the second stanza; explain this rela- 
tion between the stanzas. 

c. In still another, to the description of June; show in 
what the connection lies. 

30. The last two lines of the prelude introduce a character and 
tell of something antecedent to the June when the story 
of Part First begins. Do these lines really belong in the 
prelude ? 

Note. — If these lines belong in the prelude, they must have 
some relation to its purpose, and connected steps in the plan 
must lead the mind to them as a conclusion. 

31. In the Prelude to Part First as a whole, what was the main 
purpose of the poet ? 

32. Which is longer, the prelude, or the narrative of Part First 
which it introduces ? 

33. Is there any part of the prelude for which the main purpose 
of the introduction is not a sufficient excuse ? Would any 
other reason serve ? Express here simply your own feeling 
and opinion. 



108 TOPICS FOR STUDY 

PART FIRST 

34. What narrative elements for the story have been given in 
the Prelude ? 

35. Describe the appearance and character of Sir Launfal from 
the impression given by Lowell. 

36. How much more than he tells in words does the author 
make you understand ? How does he do this ? 

37. Describe Sir Launfal's life as you imagine it up to the be- 
ginning of the story ? 

38. In the Siege of Summer, lines 119-127, 
a. What is personified ? 

h. What was the reason for the siege ? 

c. In how many details is the picture of a siege carried out ? 

d. For each detail what is the parallel between the literal 
thing and the meaning in the figure ? 

e. Explain the use ofthi churlish, chilly. 

/. The pavilions of summer tall, the tents, the mur- 
mur at night, mean what literally ? 

39. In the story of Sir Launfal'fl quest, what is Lowell trying to 
make clear by this beautiful and extended figure ? 

40. What is the real beginning of the story of Part First ? 

11. Why did Sir Launfal Bleep Ofl the rnflhw the night before 

Btarting on hi- qn 
VI. Find every plot th:.. the beginning of 

t'ne d re a m . 

43. In the beginning of the dream, what was the time of \ 

N«>n. — Lowell may havi d of the 

dream from the belief in the time of ti that a 

vision was often Bent to guide I some holy 

quest. 

11. 01 what element! in the real >tory i- the first part of the 

dream made up ? 
•I."). In the start what do you learn about Sir Launfal ? Why 

did Lowell choose surly as the adject 
40. What was the real purpose of the knight's quest ? What 

was the vow he bad sworn ? What particular.- 

in the narrative of the start ? Why ? 
47. Sir Launfal's first adventure. Make a little plot outline 

for this incident showing: 

a. The cause, or the beginning. 



TOPICS FOR STUDY 109 

b. The most important moment. 

c. The result and the end of the incident. 

48. What is dwelt upon in the description of the leper ? 

49. In this little plot which is more important, the refusal of the 
gift, or the reason for it ? 

Note. — This must be shown by the influence of one or the 
other upon Sir Launfal. The moral force of the reason in 
itself is not an argument to the point. 

50. How far on his quest has the knight gone when Part First 
closes ? 

51. At the close of Part First what part of the story remains 
untold ? That is, what more do you care to hear about Sir 
Launfal's quest? 

PRELUDE TO PART SECOND 

52. Why did the author choose a winter scene for the Prelude 
to Part Second ? 

53. What is the keynote, or artistic centre, for this descrip- 
tion ? 

54. In this prelude what is personified ? What is the relation 
between the persons of the figure ? 

55. What is the purpose of the first seven lines ? 

56. In the description of the winter palace of ice the terms and 
figures are borrowed from architecture : 

a. Who is the builder ? What material was used ? 

b. Is the description of the palace from without, or from 
within ? What difference does this make ? 

Note. — In An Indian-Summer Reverie, p. 47, Lowell describes 
the river as protected from the onslaught of winter in another 
way ; the material used, and the agent that builds, the frost, 
are the same, but the point of view of the description and the 
details are different. The student may compare. 

57. In the description of the hall within the castle Lowell 
uses many figures of speech ; one follows another very 
closely and sometimes the means of transition is no more 
than some habitual association in the mind. 

What is the reason that the mind passes easily from the 
personification of Christmas to the figure in the next two 

Note. — Definitions with illustrations will be found in the Century and unabridged 
dictionaries. 



110 TOPICS FOR STUDY 

lines ? Is sprouting a good adjective here ? Show reasons 
for your opinion from the picture in your mind, etc. 

58. In lines 215-224, how many times does the poet change 
his comparison, and thus suggest a new picture in the 
mind ? 

59. Which of these comparisons belong to the picture of the 
great fireplace and the blazing yule log ? 

60. For each of the following explain — 

a. What two things the poet compares. 

b. In what the similarity lies. 

c. Whether differences come to your mind in spite of your- 
self as you read ? The numbers refer to the lines of the 
poem. 

(215. deep gulf. f220. hunted to death. 

21G. roaring tide. Ui'<>. galleries blind. 

'111. pennons droop. ] 221. troops of sparks. 
219. a locust shrills. [223. soot-forest. 
01. in the figure which the line Like herds of startled deer 
completes, carry out two descriptions, one of deer fleeing 

from the BOenl of the hunter on the wind, the other of the 
picture in the fireplace which it parallels, and point out every 
similarity you can find, and also anything in which the two 
pictures arc vcrv dissimilar. 

62. There is one rery unpleasant figure in thi< stanza: what is 

it ? Why is it poor \\'h\ .lid Lowell use it ? 

63. In the Prelude to Part Second. Lowell attempted to write a 
parallel to the Prelude to Part First in plan, arra: _ 

ami relation to the story that follow*, and at the same time 

to oontrasl the tun prelndef sharply in the d. I 

and in the hidden meaning. Make in brief outline a parallel 
showing for each prelude, — 
a. Time of year. 
}>. FlaCS of scene. 

c. Description of scene without the castle. 

d. Description of castle within. 

t. The meaning of the description in relation to tlu - 

64. In the first part of the narrative the castle was gloomy and 
churlish. Why this change in the description of it ? Has 
there been any change in its use ? Is this change eonsi>tent 
with the allegorical meaning of the poem ? 

Prove by comparison and contrast ; the two deserii : 



TOPICS FOR STUDY 111 

Sir Launfal, the first and the second incident of the leper, 
furnish material. 

65. Does the description of winter, as you read, seem to belong 
in Sir Launfal's dream, or out of it ? Which did Lowell 
intend ? 

66. Is there any hint in the descriptions of the Prelude to Part 
Second that they illustrate some special thought or mean- 
ing ? 

67. Do the descriptions, figures, etc., of the second prelude 
guide the reader to any starting point for the narrative of 
Part Second ? 

68. What is the purpose of this prelude ? 

PART SECOND 

69. What is omitted between Part First and Part Second (a) 
in time; (b) in incidents; (c) in the experience of the knight; 
(d) in change of character. 

70. Are any narrative elements essential to the story given in 
the Prelude to Part Second ? 

71. In what is the beginning of the story, or plot, of Part 
Second ? 

72. Contrast the opening scene with the first adventure of the 
knight in Part First in, (a) time; (6) place; (c) descrip- 
tion of Sir Launfal ; (d) plot element, or action. 

73. Sir Launfal mused as he sat. 

a. What pictures are given ? 

b. Why are these pictures introduced here just before the 
beggar addresses the knight ? 

74. The incident of the leper. 

Compare this incident with the former one in 

a. The description of the leper. 

6. The description and situation of Sir Launfal. 

c. The gift; the reason for giving. 

d. The most important moment of the incident. 

e. The result and the conclusion. 

75. How do you explain the difference in the outcome of these 
two incidents ? 

76. In the dream, in what was the beginning ? 

77. What is the most important moment, or climax of the 
dream ? 



112 TOPICS FOR STUDY 

78. What is the result or conclusion ? 

79. If the dream were not a dream but a story, could you find 
a title for it that would give a hint of its real meaning ? 
The -waking of Sir Launfal. 

80. How long a time had passed since the story began ? 

81. How long a time did the dream seem to cover ? 

82. What was the result of the dream in Sir Launfal's life ? 

83. In the whole story, where do you find the climax ? 

84. In what is the end of the story ? 

85. What is meant by The Summer's long siege at last is 
o'er? 

86. Show by comparison whether Lowell continues and carries 
out the figure used in Part First here, or whether this line 
is no more than an allusion to carry the miud back to the 
conditions of an earlier time in the story 

87. Do you think of Sir Launfal at t lu- end as an old man 

a JTOUOg one '.' Which did Lowell intend ? Support your 

opinion from the poem. 

GENERAL TOPICS 

I. What is the theme ot reel pnrpoee of the poi n 

S 
II. What ethical truth, or lesson, did Lowell intend to em- 
body clearly and effect i\ vl\ in I 
III. In Tart Second, what dc TOO find that corresponds to and 

Qloatratee exactly the line in the Prelude to Par: I 
We Siriais climb and know it not 7 
IV. Lowell invented hifl plot Whal (\A he borrow from old 
traditions and stories 7 Did he chaugC thd 

an y thing that In- borrowed 7 
V. If Lowell thought of the Quest, and the 11 I 

allegorical symbols which he might net 

itual meaning, explain for what each part stood in his 
mind at the time of the writing vt the | 

a. The eastle in the North I'ountive. 

b. The knight. 

e. The object of the quest. 
</. The leper. 

e. The finding of the firail. 
VI. A poem is great when the special moaning in the mind of 



TOPICS FOR STUDY 113 

the author at the time of its composition includes also 
some wider truth or meaning which will always interpret 
common human experience, and inspire new love of beauty 
and of noble conduct. In this wider meaning, for what 
does the knight stand ? The castle ? The siege of 
summer ? 
VII. What definition of the true meaning, in all time, of the 

Grail is given ? 
VIII. What is the quest ? What is the significance of the find- 
ing of the Grail ? 
IX. What special belief of Lowell's do you find in this poem? 
X. What evidence or illustration do you find of the charac- 
teristics of a poet as different from a philanthropist, or a 
writer of prose ? 
XI. Which passage in this poem do you think noblest? 
Why? 
XII. Which passage do you like best ? Why ? 
XIII. Which passage do you think most full of poetic beauty 
and meaning ? Why ? 




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P The Hiawatha Primer. (Special Number.) A First Book in Reading. By 
Florence Holbrook. Cloth only, 40 cents. 

V The Book of Nature Myths. (Special Number.) A Second Book in Reading, 
to follow the Hiawatha Primer. By Florence Holbrook. Cloth only, 
45 cents. 

Q Selections from the Writings of Eleven English Authors. 

R Hawthorne's Selected Twice- Told Tales. N. Y. Regents' Requirements. 
Paper, 20 cents; linen, 30 cents. 

5 Irving's Selected Essays from the Sketch Book. N. Y. Regents' Require- 
ments. (Double Number, 30 cents; linen, 40 cents.) 

T Emerson's Nature ; Lowell's My Garden Acquaintance. N. Y. Regents' 
Requirements. 

U A Dramatization of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha. By Florence Hol- 
brook. 

Also, bound in linen: *2S cents. **4and 5, in one vol., 40 cents; likewise 6 and 
31, 11 and 63, 28 and 36, 29 and 10, 30 and 15, 32 and 133, 39 and 123, 40 and 69, 42 
and 113,55 an d 67, 57 and 58, 70 and 71, 72 and 94, 103 and 104, 119 and 120, 121 
and 122. % Also in one vol., 40 cents. %% 1, 4, and 30 also in one vol., 50 cents; 
likewise 7, 8, and 9; 28, 37 and 27 ; 33, 34, and 35 ; 64, 65, and 66. § Double Num- 
ber, paper, 30 cents; linen, 40 cents. §§ Triple Number, paper, 45 cents; linen, 
50 cents. §§§ Quadruple Number, paper, 50 cents ; linen, 60 cents. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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